DE LAS ACTAS DE MATRIMONIO

The twentieth century—or, as it has been dubbed, “the sexual cen- tury”—is widely considered to be the historical moment at which sex is, finally and emphatically, modernized.18 It is useful to remember, how- ever, that the forces of modernization do not produce sex as a single, sleekly aerodynamic entity, but as a fuzzier yet overdetermined field of operation in which the normative values of personhood are variously confirmed, pursued, reworked, and refused. As a central cipher for mod- ern sex, orgasm is closely bound to its fortunes and consequently shaped by its historical transformations: by altered understandings of love (both romantic and erotic); by the rise of intimacy as a social value that takes sex as one of its communicative forms as well as by gendered norms and the differential relations to notions of the private and the public that they espouse. Although there are in circulation various different accounts 16. Berlant, “Starved,” 436.

17. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 12. 18. Person, The Sexual Century.

about why and when sex changed, along with different assessments of the value of those transformations, the same general shifts being seen by some as progressive, by others as evidence of social decline, the de- termining coordinates for modern sex are those broad forces regularly identified as key to the rise of modernity more generally: secularism, in- dustrialism, urbanism, scientific rationalism, technological progress, de- mocratization, individualism, liberalism, and capitalism.

The modernization of sex is therefore indexed to such phenomena as the implantation of sexuality as the interiorized truth of the subject; the invention of perversion and the normalization of demographic popula- tions; the emergence of homosexuality and heterosexuality as taxonomic categories; the proliferation of sexual subcultures; the increasing impor- tance of the individual as a unit of social calibration; the ascendency of discourses of autonomy, self- determination, and reflexive becoming; the simultaneous privatization and commodification of sex and sexual iden- tity; the increasing association of sex with recreational pleasure rather than reproduction; and the liberalization of marriage. While the various “isms” of modernity—for example, secularism, capitalism, individual- ism—give rise to the historical circumstances of the disenchantment of the world in which sex comes to be figured as voluntarist, efficient, utili- tarian, and an object of scientific knowledge, they equally sacralize sex, enabling it to be seen as redemptive, transformative, even magical.19 As religion becomes less the organizing principle of human life, as capi- talism radically alters the conditions that traditionally anchored social relations, and as mass- mediated social imaginaries publicize modes of affective being and belonging that must in their best declension remain private, sex emerges as an unresolved cryptograph, simultaneously a site of potential alienation and actualization, at once a new object of knowl- edge and the secret seat of the unique individual defined more by her inner life than her place in a stratified social system.20

19. Discussing the mid- nineteenth- century rise in America and Europe of a sys- tematized understanding of sexual magic, Hugh B. Urban uses the phrase magia

sexualis to describe “not just any loose association of sex with spirituality, and not simply the optimization of sensual pleasure during intercourse, but rather the ex- plicit use of orgasm (whether heterosexual, homosexual, or autoerotic) as a means to create magical effects in the external world” (Magia Sexualis, 3).

20. My thinking here, and elsewhere in this book, about the gendering of mass- mediated social imaginaries has been deeply informed by Lauren Berlant’s brilliant work on the “intimate sphere of public femininity” (Female Complaint, 2).

Although sex and orgasm do not necessarily entail each other, any coherent understanding of twentieth- century orgasm must be strongly shaped by a historical awareness that the modernization of sex makes it virtually impossible to stabilize what sex means. Across the twenti- eth century, for example, sex—and often orgasm quite specifically— becomes increasingly the measure for both individual happiness or sat- isfaction and the worth of intimate relationships.21 As Frances Ferguson puts it: “In a world in which happiness is constantly being checked, the measurement of happiness itself seduces individuals into produc- ing readily identifiable actions, to valuing the techniques of measure- ment. . . . With the happiness- measuring system, individuals are always on the lookout for occasions in which to demonstrate their happiness to themselves, and sex acts—defined very explicitly as physical plea- sures that reach their limit in the satisfaction of orgasm—simply become easier to work with than the notion of a married state that expresses itself in continuation rather than in its constant production of altered states.”22 As Ferguson’s distancing, skeptical tone indicates, however, “the happiness- measuring system” itself generates discontent. For if sex, and orgasm in particular, is taken as the measure of happiness, a deeply personalizing calculus, then the suspicion quickly arises that, as the unit of calibration, sex, and orgasm in particular, is susceptible to deeply im- personalizing techniques of commodification and rationalization. Something of what is at stake here in the simultaneous intensifica- tion of the personal and impersonal dimensions of modern sex might 21. As early as 1947, the increasing valuation of orgasm was being decried, par- ticularly as it related to heterosexual women’s erotic expectations. In their retro- grade Modern Woman, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham attempt to per- suade that “mere orgasm can never be the entire sexual goal for a satisfactorily functioning woman,” who instead “must, in the depths of her mind, desire, deeply and utterly, to be a mother.” In their view, no amount of orgasms can soothe the unmaternal, sexually autonomous woman, since “it need not be assumed that the free- living female, even though orgastically fully reactive, has mastered the ‘sexual problem.’ She is usually having man trouble” (Modern Woman, 265, 296).

22. Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory, 121. For an example of the happiness- measurement system in action, see David Farley Hurlbert’s and Carol Apt’s claim that “some studies have shown that sexual activity that terminates in orgasm may have a reinforcement value, leading respondents to desire more sex. Greater marital happi- ness and emotional closeness are positively related to a higher percentage of sexual activity leading to female orgasm” (“The Coital Alignment Technique,” 21–22).

be specified via reference to Steven Seidman’s historical account of de- velopments in understandings of romantic love in the United States be- tween 1830 and 1980. Seidman argues that across the nineteenth century the relation between sex and love undergoes significant transformation, love becoming increasingly defined as a sexual rather than a spiritual or affective relation. By the early twentieth century, as a vast marital advice literature testifies, sex was valorized as a practice whereby love was com- municated and sustained. Seidman argues that the importance of sexual satisfaction and the positive attention paid to erotic technique associated with this “sexualization of love” in turn gave rise in the second half of the century to a further major change in which sex is valued for its own sake.23 No longer only an expression of romantic feeling, sex accrued an independent worth as a vehicle for pleasure and self- actualization, the eroticization of sex uneasily supplementing its continued romanticiza- tion. In Seidman’s historical explanation, the romanticization of love and its eroticization have coexisted since the middle of the twentieth century, structuring a diverse range of conflicts and debates around the public meaning of sex. Conceptualizing these conflicts as emerging from the incompatibility of two coeval discourses, Seidman primarily tells the his- torical story of sex as a cultural contest between different groups of social actors, puritans and sexual reformers, for example, or conservatives and libertarians. This widely accepted account, however, impedes a clear ap- prehension of the fact that a single logic structures the double bind of modern sex. It is, after all, the alienation of the historical Western subject under the well- known and affectively bruising conditions of modernity that makes sex newly available as a compensatory technology of recog- nition. This is, however, only another way of saying that no matter how much sex is imagined as a privileged practice for the alleviation of the anomie that characterizes modern social relations by dint of its being ap- prehended as an intimate act, both particularizing and privatizing, it is equally available for the experience, whether depressive or euphoric, of the same impersonal intimacies it is normatively understood to counter. Niklas Luhmann’s Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy offers a compelling account of this imbrication of personal and impersonal intimacies in contemporary life. Rather than take intimacy’s promise at face value and endorse the self as the crucible for modern life, Luhmann instead makes intimacy visible as a problem of codification, analytically 23. Seidman, Romantic Longings, 4.

separating the individual from the privatized regimes of intimacy that are more commonly thought of as his or her affective ecosystem. He be- gins by noting that “modern society is to be distinguished from older social formations by the fact that it has become more elaborate in two ways: it affords more opportunities both for impersonal and for more in- tensive personal relationships.”24 The intimate sphere is neither simply a result of a greater capacity for or an increased valuation of private life nor even a solution to the effects of the densifying networks of nonpar- ticular, impersonal relationships we engage in daily, however much it might be promoted or pursued as if it were. It is better understood as an effect of a historical need for regulating the individual’s ability to nego- tiate relations between the two contradictory interfaces of the personal and the impersonal. Despite the value of this insight for thinking about the modernization of sex, however, Luhmann himself remains disparag- ing about the erotic potentialities of impersonality.

Luhmann’s use of systems theory to lay bare the semantics of inti- macy is notable for its dispassionate detachment. How else to describe his historical framing of love as “a generalized symbolic communicative medium assigned specifically to facilitating, cultivating and promoting the communicative treatment of individuality”?25 Yet his consideration of the role sex plays in the context of “modern society’s radicalization of the difference between personal and impersonal relationships” indicates that there are limits to his unflappability.26 Having traced the historical transformations in the symbolic communication of love from medieval courtly love to the amour passion emergent in the second half of the seventeenth century to the Romantic form of love established around 1800, Luhmann finds the contemporary situation, in which love relations have less institutional support but are more heavily freighted with inter- personal expectation, harder to codify: “The current semantics of love is more difficult to define in terms of one general formula than were any of its predecessors.”27 Repeatedly he declares himself unable to detect or express the form of the code that systematizes late twentieth- century intimate relations.28

24. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 12. 25. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 14. 26. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 161–62. 27. Luhmann, Love as Passion, 155.

The problem, it seems, is sex, specifically the possibility that it can occur in an impersonal register in which the participants do not engage with each other on the basis of their personhoods, that is, their unique psychological, social, or professional profiles. Dominated by “a clini- cal, therapeutic concern for full orgasmic satisfaction, which creates its own paradoxies; and by the barely conscious, but all the more manifest semantics of sport,” sex is deemed no longer able to represent adequately intimacy, which always exists, for Luhmann, in a personalizing—or, as he might say, interpenetrating—register.29 Apparently unable to codify, except as a problem, the impersonalizing intimacies to which contempo- rary erotic practice also gives rise, Luhmann draws back from the fullest implications of his claim that “as never before, the personal / impersonal distinction becomes the constitutive difference.”30 Although a large part of the appeal of Luhmann’s work is the sharply historicizing and denatu- ralizing torque he gives intimacy as a concept, his reluctance to recog- nize contemporary forms of intimacy as also and positively impersonal commits him to a heteronormative framework that significantly limits the purchase of his analysis.