Love in the time of capitalism

On Valentine’s Day morning, I found myself on a cross-town bus, navigating through a thick traffic of last-minute chocolate buyers and trucks delivering flowers, and descending into a tunnel under a giant billboard advertising “Valentine’s Day”—the movie. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times movie review disparaged the star-packed “Love Actually” knockoff as “stuffed with an astonishment of clichés” and a “miscellany of men and women who laugh and weep through an assortment of contrived setups.” The gripes of Times reviewer Manohla Dargis ring true, since the film presents a popular depiction of Valentine’s Day as a cliché caught up in the paws of Hallmark commercialism.

However, further contemplation during my bus ride and three-hour prison term in the movie theater have led me to a new conclusion—perhaps Valentine’s Day is not a problem in itself, but rather a symptom of our culture’s diseased attitude toward romantic love and emotions as a whole.

The holiday originated in 496 AD, when Pope Gelasius I—famous for suppressing pagan rites and heretics—established the feast of Saint Valentine’s Day to honor Valentine, a priest stoned and beheaded by Roman Emperor Claudius II for marrying Christian couples. In the 14th century—a near millennium later—Geoffrey Chaucer cemented the feast’s association with courtly love.

The celebration of Valentine’s Day, like Halloween and Christmas, has surely drifted from its traditional origins. Despite the commercialism of its peer holidays, however, Valentine’s Day endures the most persecution by cynics. Complaints of “cliché” or “commercialization” of love suggest that our celebration of Valentine’s Day antagonizes a higher societal ideal of love. I am skeptical about whether we actually have this. Is our concept of love really so passionate, unique, and unbridled by capitalism?

In 1961, sociologist Michel Foucault traced the social history of insanity back to the Middle Ages—well before Chaucer—in his acclaimed work “Madness and Civilization.” Medieval mad people, those unable to constrain their emotions or control their speech, roamed through cities and raved at the gates of the upper-class. During the Enlightenment, madness emerged as unreason, the polar opposite of predominant reason. As capitalism emerged, insanity became defined by economic un-productivity. How can you go calmly to work in an office or factory when you’re raging with passion, drowning in sorrow, or, most importantly, dying for love?

Madness became institutionalized—and the poet, overcome by emotion, became a marginal figure in society, languishing in a dusty garret far removed from the means of production. This post-Enlightenment conviction contrasts sharply with the literary past. Corneille in France felled his protagonists, each a powerful noble, in duels over love. Italians Boccaccio and Petrarch swore to a courtly love we would now consider obsessive, unrealistic—perhaps even a medical problem. Shakespeare in England redoubled all of these romantic impulses.

Foucault leads us toward the following belief: Concurrent with the advent of capitalism, dying for love—once the honorable pursuit of nobility—becomes simply inconvenient. Each individual’s desire for monetary gain facilitates the smooth and even moral functionality of society. It is no coincidence that Adam Smith’s 1776 “Wealth of Nations,” the Genesis of the capitalist canon, was born into the Western consciousness within two years of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther.” Goethe’s protagonist is no Cornelian noble, but an artist living in the margins of German economic life. In the culminating moment of the novel, Werther kills himself out of love for the married Lotte.

The contemporary psychiatrist is probably itching to medicate Werther—what sort of compulsion or obsession afflicts him until the bitter moment of suicide? Werther forfeits years of potential economic productivity, of contributing to and benefiting from his community, by surrendering to a love that sits uncomfortably with the modern reader. This modern reader has been raised with the expectation that he or she will obediently move on after a shot at love fizzles.

It is no wonder, then, that Dargis finds the “Valentine’s Day” movie’s love scenes “clichéd” and “contrived” when capitalism declares anything else unhealthy, insane. No uplifting, feel-good film like “Valentine’s Day” could gross the same box-office revenues if it featured a sicko like Werther. When critics like Dargis deplore Valentine’s Day—or when we deplore its business partners Hallmark and Godiva—we unconsciously criticize our society’s dilute concept of love.

Consider the daily vocabulary we apply to emotions. “Sorrowful” sounds exaggerated and antiquated, so we use “sad.” “Mad” refers not to wild raving lunatics, but rather to “I’m mad at you.” “Passionate” is a stone’s throw from “crazy.” Our lust after productivity renders impotent our capacity to feel. Perhaps we should reevaluate our cynicism about Valentine’s Day and reconsider love in the time of capitalism.

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College first year with an intended major in anthropology or comparative literature and society. The Far-Side runs alternate Tuesdays.