Polyamory and kitsch
Capitalism, art, and ways of life
In modernity ways of life are constantly produced and destroyed, apparently only to preserve that which already is the case. In art, the changing appearance of the world demands new formal expression to the “universal” mission of art—this is the meaning of the avant-garde, as endorsed by a Baudelaire or a Schönberg. The avant-garde pursues artistic ideas that push received forms to their limits—exploding them, if necessary—following the demands of the immanent logic of their development, and thereby inadvertently expressing the objective crisis of the world of which they are born.
Conservatism or academicism is the decision to stay on charted territory, pursuing known problems with known tools. This need not be reactionary—one can be an honest conservative, who declares ‘I simply don’t get it, and don’t care enough to try and get it.’ Dishonest conservatives will not be satisfied with this, and instead will go to great lengths to renounce new artistic movements. They will inevitably fail, because they are simply wrong—they only betray their own inability to understand the objective truth of the material.
Somewhere between the two a new category emerges, that of kitsch. As Clement Greenberg argued, kitsch is unimaginable before the avant-garde, as it trades in the promise of the same profundity that the avant-garde artwork offers. However, while the interpretation of the avant-garde artwork requires a specialised training in reception, kitsch integrates the task of interpretation into the artwork itself—it comes pre-processed. The need for cognition on the part of the subject is removed—or rather, displaced. This is the thrust of the pretentious accusation that a work, e.g., a film, ‘treats its viewer as stupid.’
Artists produce the avant-garde, conservatism and kitsch in pursuing artistic ideas amidst the crisis of society. We observe that people do more or less the same in the realm of everyday life—pursuing some idea of how to live, while the world is changing around them. It should be evident, then, that ways of life can also be classed as ‘avant-garde,’ or ‘conservative.’ Indeed, we instinctively do this all the time. But what about ‘kitsch?’ Is there such thing as ‘kitsch life?’ To attempt an answer, let us turn to that greatest and most contested constituent of the good life, love.
Bourgeois monogamy has been in crisis, perhaps since the moment of its birth. As John D’Emilio does with gay identity, we can trace the modern conception of ‘free love’ to twentieth century urban life. It is a response to a real problem: the oppression of exclusivity, especially within the patriarchal household that perpetuates the wretched division of labour between the sexes. It corresponds to the increased participation of women in the labour force as male labour is devalued in automation or made scarce by war. Since the 1910s, there have been periodic flare-ups in calls for ‘free love’, most famously in the 1960s. Contemporary ‘polyamory’, that has seen widespread practice amongst young people in cities from Berlin to San Francisco, is the latest of these. We might further wish to connect these flare-ups to the most active periods of ‘Left’ politics in the past century, the Old, the New and Millennial left, followed by periods of conservatism and restoration.
Aren’t the original pioneers of ‘free love’ and polyamory the avant-garde of changed cultural conditions? Aren’t they artists of the new ways of life made necessary by the decay of old ones? Aren’t they the ones explicating the objective tendencies of their material: human life and love? Of course they are! They proudly face their detractors—the dishonest conservatives. These will claim that polyamory is impractical, immoral, unaesthetic or unnatural. All of their arguments reek of reaction and can be easily refuted, their inconsistency and short-sightedness demonstrated. After all, their beloved monogamy is also impractical, immoral, unaesthetic and unnatural. Even worse, it has been judged to be obsolete by history.
Polyamory is initially pursued by those whom monogamy failed—who faced abuse, neglect, unfaithfulness and the bleak certainty of something not entirely glamorous. If they are ahead of the rest of us, it need not mean that they are rushing forth with excitement—they might be chased. They are on uncharted waters and have no choice but to navigate through. The resentful conservative will not recognise that the reason he is not drawn to the new cultural form is simply because he has no need for it. This lack of desire makes him scared—what if he is doing something foolish, what if he is left behind, if there is something wrong with him? This fear betrays a great deal of narcissism. The weakened ego cannot properly desire, and the subject seeks to fill the hole with attempts at identification. The resentful conservative’s fear of obsolescence can prompt an inauthentic rushing-forward and embrace of the new. This brings us to kitsch life.
If there is an avant-garde to ways of life, there is a space for kitsch life—to deal in the profundity of the avant-garde, but presented as ready-made rules, as something reified and solidified, packaged as a commodity, pre-processed and pre-interpreted. Kitsch soothes the fear of obsolescence. Kitsch is the method by which the critical character of the avant-garde is tamed and turned into a substitute object integrable into the rest of life. It is now easy enough to find hundreds of ‘self-help’ books and online sources refuting monogamy, giving advice on resolving jealousy, and offering exercises to disambiguate the ‘problematic’ roots and consequences of having only one lover at a time. Artificially reproduced is the spirit of discovery, of being on the ‘cutting edge’—but the answers are offered ready-made, the cognition outsourced from the subject to the instruction manual.
This is the kitsch life generated out of the genuine avant-garde, served for those too anxious to be left behind. No surprise that these people often end up deeply unhappy, jealous and bitter, and when polyamory throws up unique problems of its own, they are not compelled to solve them. The bitterness and resentment from their life as a conservative will follow them into their life of kitsch. They also keep their prudishness—as the number of lovers grows, so does the proportion of their time devoted to meetings, consultations, emotional processing, self-pity, self-hatred, meditations and negotiations rather than love itself. Even the most avant-garde polyamory never escapes counter-identification with its predecessor, monogamy, and without a genuine internal or external compulsion it collapses back into the latter.
As long as one merely seeks the infantile pleasure of identification, and doesn’t start desiring and willing, one is destined to be perpetually lost, no matter the number of sexual partners. The dishonest conservative with his old-fashioned monogamy is scared of facing up to the possibility that he might in fact be quite happy where he is—cognizance of this happiness would reveal his vulnerability to a future where society changes again—only to remain the same—, but this time it will be him thrown under the bus, his job lost, his personality deemed unpleasant, his beliefs suspect, his love not enough.
One can, however, be an honest conservative—the understanding of the polyamorous as a romantic-sexual avant-garde clarifies the choice of remaining happily monogamous. One can freely decide to pursue a way of life that might not be available in the future, one that might be decaying, but at least one with known failings and expectations. One can try and stick to old forms. We are likely to be conservatives in many areas of life and to find ourselves on the avant-garde in others. Relinquishing our fear frees us up to focus less on the form our love takes and more on actually loving.
The dishonest conservative hates that he is a conservative, hence his desire, often sublimated into hatred, to identify with the avant-garde. This drives him into kitsch life. Healthy personality development would involve the honest externalisation of the desire of an extant ego—and to pursue this desire, one would authentically face up to any limits of received social forms. Or—and there is nothing wrong with that—one can happily and honestly remain a conservative. When anxious, one should tell oneself: ‘If you have to change your life, you will know.’ New ways of life, like new schools of art, emerge not out of spontaneous acts of volition, but when a new possibility meets a new necessity. ‘Remember: you too, might one day have to be the avant-garde.’