How capitalism has transformed relationships and emotional life

As a result, it is difficult to separate capitalism from the rest. It is difficult to figure out in what way capitalism manipulates emotions: how some emotions are not manipulated, and some are. The influence of capitalism is on culture, on values, on how we conduct our everyday life. But that’s not all. It also deeply influences our private life, even our intimate life, and the ways in which we speak to ourselves.

My work has focused on showing the ways in which the cultural grammar of capitalism has penetrated and reshaped the grammar of intimacy and personal relationships.

Capitalism is defined as an economy which puts the maximisation of profit at the centre of all economic activity, and even social activity; the maximisation of profit becomes an end in itself. This is why capitalism tends to view everything – from the state, its organisations and institutions to simple ordinary workers – as mere instruments and tools to maximise profit. This is bound to have profound consequences on society, on relationships and on our commitment to society.

Around this period, we observe a profound change in the meaning of what we call romantic love and romance. This change is manifest in the emergence of a new concept: dating. Dating means encountering someone for a romantic or sexual purpose, but it also means consuming some activity of leisure together, such as going to a restaurant, going to drink something, going to a dance hall, or using the car, as was often the case at the beginning of the 20th century. This had significant consequences on the feeling and the practice of romance as it took romance out of the domestic home and brought it out to the public sphere of leisure. It attached the consumption of leisure to the meaning of what qualifies as a romantic moment.

Tourism is both an intangible commodity and a tangible one. That commodity becomes associated with romance. For modern people, having a romantic experience is often associated with the experience of tourism, of having dinner in a faraway place. We have seen, for example, the emergence of a large industry of honeymoons combining tourism with romance. That’s one example of the ways in which capitalism takes over a domain of private life, of emotional life, and transforms it – but in a way that feels very much our own. We never really feel the intrusion of the public world of commodities when we have these experiences. On the contrary, we have a heightened experience of the bond that connects us to someone else.

Think of a workshop to modify your high level of anger, or to have better emotional communication with your husband. We think of these as psychological services – and these are indeed forms of psychological services – but we can also think of them as being emotional commodities, because what you’re actually purchasing is a particular emotion. It is a particular emotional transformation.

Another example would be the horror movie. The category of the horror movie as such did not initially exist. When Frankenstein came out, it was an instant success and Hollywood tried to elaborate a formula that would capture what was so successful. This is how the genre of the horror movie came about. It is a genre whose purpose is to provoke a very specific or a range of very specific emotions in the viewer. Or, think about music that is created in order to produce a certain affective mood or state. For the last 30 or 40 years, capitalism has worked very hard on creating affect and emotions. This is what I call “emodities”.

What the French philosopher Georges Bataille called “waste” – the idea that you can engage in a relationship that does not necessarily do you good, that can even destroy you; this form of relationship that does not serve any utilitarian purpose – has become foreign to our vocabulary. What has taken over the language of the psyche and interpersonal relationships is a utilitarian language of maximising our pleasure. Relationships which do not maximise our utilities – which do not “meet our needs”, as we commonly say – are increasingly deemed to be inadequate. So, there has been a historical encounter between the popular language of psychology and the semantics of the market.

But what is more interesting is that sites such as Tinder present characteristics of capitalist modes of production. For example, one of the main attractions in these sites is the hyper-abundance of choice. Hyper-abundance of choice has been one of the clear mottos of mass consumer culture, of consumer production. The speed with which we are exposed to people and move from one person to another has been one of the chief organising principles of capitalist modes of production.

The extraordinary abundance of choice and the speed with which we approach and consume these choices are salient characteristics of capitalism. More specifically, they are salient characteristics of modes of mass production and mass consumption. All these examples show that it is difficult to disentangle our emotions, our interpersonal relationships, from capitalism because capitalism is so pervasive.

A second important element would be to approach relationships with non-utilitarian principles: not wanting to maximise one’s well-being, which also means being able to endure the boredom and the repetitiveness which often exist in long-term relationships.

Having said that, disentangling some aspects of the commodification of emotions might prove to be impossible and futile. For example, leisure now occupies too big a place in our personal life for us to disentangle it from our emotional life. So, leisure, which is an extremely important way to experience interpersonal relationships, probably cannot be disposed of. The same is true of psychology. Psychology is a therapeutic service, but it has also been commodified. This particular way of commodifying emotions is something that will probably stay with us, and which paradoxically is experienced as enabling us to be more authentic subjects. So, one of the great ironies or paradoxes of the colonisation of emotions and private life by capitalism is that it enables greater, not lesser, authenticity.