Eva Illouz > Quotes

“The culture of capitalism is self-contradictory, demanding that people be hard workers by day and hedonists by night.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Emotions are activated by a general and undifferentiated state of arousal, which becomes an emotion only when appropriately labeled. For example, the same general state of arousal could trigger either fear or infatuation, depending on environmental cues. If this is indeed the case, we can then expect culture to play a considerable role in the construction, interpretation, and functioning of emotions. Culture operates as a frame within which emotional experience is organized, labeled, classified, and interpreted. Cultural frames name and define the emotion, set the limits of its intensity, specify the norms and values attached to it, and provide symbols and cultural scenarios that make it socially communicative.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“A cultural change is less a matter of content than a restructuring of relationships between subordinate and dominant elements.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Love is more than a cultural ideal; it is a social foundation for the self. Yet, the cultural resources that make it constitutive of the self have been depleted.”
― Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation

“The intertwining of love and romance with hedonist and antimodernist themes marked the shift from Victorian morality to a consumption-oriented or 'hedonistic' one in which pleasure was encouraged actively rather than dealt with ambivalently.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Romance novels constitute 46 percent of all mass market paperbacks sold in the United States, and according to Harlequin, over half its customers buy an average of 30 novels a month”
― Eva Illouz, Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers, and Society

“Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The notion of autonomy, indeed, affirms with one hand what it denies with the other. On the one hand, corporations want their workers to be self-directed, but also to conform to the corporate culture, which implies not to be independent at all, but rather to obediently comply with the corporation’s principles, values and goals. Corporations also emphasize independence and initiative, yet they do so in a working context in which the majority of workers lack real control over their decisions, tasks and purposes. Autonomy, hence, seems to be just simple rhetoric to make workers do what otherwise they would not if not so compelled, that is, if their job did not depend on it.”
― Eva Illouz

“Culture is sometimes only a context in which people relate to each other, but sometimes culture has a power of its own to shape and transform social relationships.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Never really either private or public, the modern self establishes its value through processes that are at once psychological and sociological, private and
public, emotional and ritualistic. Clearly, then, in modern erotic/romantic relationships what is at stake are the self, its emotions, interiority, and, mostly, the way these are recognized (or fail to be recognized) by others.”
― Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation

“The beauty-romance link was extended to cover the desire for self-expression, and the new nexus of beauty, self-expression, and romance was in turn fostered by the culture of consumption. Love was thus made to reinforce a definition of selfhood centered around the commodities that provided youth, beauty, charm, glamour, and seductive power.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Heterosexual romantic love contains the two most important cultural revolutions of the twentieth century: the individualization of lifestyles and the intensification of emotional life projects; and the economization of social relationships, the pervasiveness of economic models to shape the self and its very emotions.”
― Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation

“Culture thus is a matter of shared meanings, but it is not only that: it is also one of the ways in which exclusion, inequality, and power structures are maintained and reproduced.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“As the centrality of religion declined during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, romantic love was inevitably carried along by the new wave of secularization. The themes of selflessness, sacrifice, and idealism were more and more brushed aside. Romantic love ceased being presented in the terms of religious discourse, at the very same time it started playing a central role in the culture at large. In face, in the view of some historians, romance replaced religion as the focus of daily life.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Ultimately the main idea that lies behind happiness repertoires and techniques is that happier people are not only more productive and efficient workers but, most importantly, better citizens. In twenty-first-century capitalism, a powerful happiness industry has indeed emerged and expanded with the simply but alluring promise that by transforming into happier selves through the vast myriad of happiness products and services available, individuals will increase their value as social, political and economic subjects.”
― Eva Illouz

“Culture cannot be understood in terms of probabilities. To understand culture is to understand, in Michael Schudson's words, the social significance of the statistically insignificant, as well as the seamless web of meanings people draw on to make sense of social situations.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Biswas-DIener and Dean claim that ‘so important is our work to our identity that we proudly claim our occupation as synonymous with who we are.’ Individuals are most fulfilled, they argue, when they have a ‘calling-orientation’ approach to work, meaning they work because they love to do it and because it makes them flourish, not because they ‘have to.’ The authors conveniently leave unaddressed the question of just exactly how someone can develop a calling when working as a pizza deliverer, a McDonald’s cashier or an office cleaner, but forcefully marshal the working and lower-middle classes to the ideal of the upper-middle classes.”
― Eva Illouz

“Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an Idea, perfect and complete.2 Endless novels, poems, or movies teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is far more silent on the no-less-mysterious moment when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours ago. This silence is all the more puzzling as the number of relationships that dissolve soon after their beginning or at some point down along their emotional line is staggering.Perhaps our culture does not know how to represent or think about this because we live in and through stories and dramas, and “unloving” is not a plot with a clear structure. More often than not it does not start with an inaugural moment, a revelation. On the contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after they properly started, while others end with slow and incomprehensible death.”
― Eva Illouz, El fin del amor: Una sociología de las relaciones negativas

“Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Attention regulated by visuality generates low attentiveness, especially when visual objects take a commodity form, that is, exist in abundance, compete with one another, are on view, and become easily interchangeable. ...Visual evaluation in a large market of bodies as images entails devaluation through low attentiveness.”
― Eva Illouz, El fin del amor: Una sociología de las relaciones negativas

“This excessive blame of individuals for their failure to lead happier lives would actually explain in part why individuals of individualist societies tend to rank themselves as above 7 out of 10 points in happiness questionnaires. According to some studies, a cognitive positive bias would account for the strong and systematic tendency amongst individuals of these societies to protect their self-esteem by inhibiting negative evaluations of their lives.”
― Eva Illouz

“To be sure, researchers on data mining have yet to offer any significant breakthrough regarding human happiness - that people prefer weekends to Tuesdays, that rain affects moods, that depressed individuals prefer darker colours and hues, and that Christmas is one of the happiest days of the year are amongst their earth-shaking findings.”
― Eva Illouz

“Since happiness is defined in terms of positive feelings and personal gains, striving for happiness requires competition and therefore may damage people’s social connections and increase both their sense of loneliness and detachment from others. Similarly, many other authors have reported that happiness positively correlates with narcissism, which lies at the core of self-aggrandizement, selfishness, egocentrism, hubristic pride, and self-absorption, all of them aspects underlying a vast array of mental disorders.”
― Eva Illouz

“Because the ideal of sexual freedom has focused on sexual repression and domination, it has omitted to ponder about the negative effects on cultures dominated by the freedom to exit. We have failed to inquire about the extent to which the repeated or frequent experience of breakup may harm the possibility of holding on to a secure sense of self and of forming durable and meaningful relationships.”
― Eva Illouz, The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations

“If the sociologist could hear the voices of men and women searching for love, s/he would hear a long and loud litany of moans and groans.”
― Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation

“The transformations undergone by the meaning of love are characterized by:

1) the extrication of love from religion, that is, the secularization of the discourse of love

2) the increasing prominence of the theme of love in mass culture, especially in film and advertising

3) the glorification of the theme of love as a supreme value and the equation of love with happiness

4) the inclusion of 'intensity' and 'fun' in the new definitions of romance, marriage, and domesticity”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“The political utopia envisioned by Marx and Engels clearly implied a total separation between commodity and sentiment, interest and love, as a precondition for authentic, fully human relationships.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Love was central to Victorians' sense of self because through it they learned to know not only their partners but themselves. Love was a template for authentic, albeit restrained, expression of their inner self, but it was also a means to attain spiritual perfection, as was made clear by the consistent association of the romantic discourse with the values and metaphors of religion.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Happiness, indeed, becomes not only a prerequisite for work - more and more managers claim to select workers according to their levels of happiness and positivity - but also the very content of the work itself, with positive emotions, attitude and motivations rising as essential psychological features, even more important or essential than skills or technical qualifications.”
― Eva Illouz

“The systematic association between love, marriage, and bliss was different from nineteenth-century representations, in which love was more often tragic rather than a happy feeling.”
― Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism