study, I shed light on the changes in the very notion and structure of choice of a mate, here I focus on another and new category of choice: the choice to “unchoose”—a form of choice that comes after the various struggles for freedom we saw during the last two hundred years. If during the formation of modernity actors fought for their right to have a sexuality unhindered by community or social constraints, in contemporary modernity they take for granted that sexuality is a choice and a right, unquestioned and unquestionable (with the exception perhaps of gay marriage, which has been the latest frontier of the old struggle). One’s freedom is incessantly exercised by the right to not engage in or disengage from relations, a process that we may call the “choice to unchoose”: to opt out of relationships at any stage.
Although I am not suggesting a straightforward, direct causality, the analogy between the history of capitalism and that of romantic forms is striking. In its modern period, capitalism took such economic forms as the corporation, the limited liability company, the international financial markets, and the commercial contract. In these economic forms, hierarchy, control, and contract are central. These were reflected in the view of love as a contractual relationship, freely entered, bound by ethical rules of commitment, yielding obvious returns and demanding long-term emotional strategies and investment. Insurance companies were crucial institutions to minimize risks, acting as third parties between two contractors, thus increasing the reliability of the commercial contract. This social organization of capitalism evolved and morphed into a ramified global network, with scattered ownership and control. It now practices new forms of non-commitment through flextime or outsourcing labor, providing little social safety nets, and breaking bonds of loyalty between workers and workplaces in legislation and practices that decreased dramatically corporations’ commitment to workers. Contemporary capitalism has also developed instruments to exploit uncertainty—for example, derivatives—and even makes the value of certain goods uncertain creating “spot markets,” offering prices that are incessantly adjusted to demand, thus simultaneously creating and exploiting uncertainty. Practices of non-commitment and non-choice enable a corporation’s quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices, practices that enable corporations to quickly form and break loyalties, and the swift renewal and changing of lines of production and the unhindered firing of the workforce. All of these are practices of non-choice. Choice, which was the early motto of “solid capitalism,” then has morphed into non-choice, the practice of perpetually adjusting one’s preferences “on the go,” not to engage in, pursue, or commit to relationships in general, whether economic or romantic. These practices of non-choice are somehow combined with intensive calculative strategies of risk assessment.
Traditionally, sociology—symbolic interactionism in particular—has almost axiomatically focused on the micro-formation of social bonds, and has by definition been unable to grasp the more elusive mechanism of how relationships end, collapse, evaporate, or fade. In networked modernity, the proper object of study becomes the ways in which bonds dissolve where this dissolution is taken to be a social form. This dissolution of relationships occurs not through a direct breakdown of relationships—alienation, reification, instrumentalization, exploitation—but through the moral injunctions that constitute the imaginary core of the capitalist subjectivity, such as the injunction to be free and autonomous; to change, optimize the self and realize one’s hidden potential; to maximize pleasure, health, and productivity. It is the positive injunction to both produce and maximize the self that shapes “negative choice.” I will show that the choice to unchoose is now a crucial modality of subjectivity, made possible by a variety of institutional changes: the no-fault divorce (which made it easier for people to opt out of marriage for their own subjective emotional reasons); the contraceptive pill, which made it easier to have sexual relationships without the institutional stakes of marriage and thus without emotional commitment; the consumer market of leisure, which provides a large number of venues to meet and an ongoing supply of sexual partners; the technology afforded by the Internet, especially by dating sites such as Tinder or Match.com, which turn the subject into a consumer of sex and emotions, entitled to the right to use or dispose of the commodity at will; and finally the worldwide success of platforms like Facebook, which both multiply relationships and which enable the quick “unfriending” as a technical feature of a software. These and many other less visible cultural features documented in this book make the choice to unchoose into a dominant modality of subjectivity in networked modernity and societies characterized by advanced processes of commodification, the multiplication of sexual choice, and the penetration of economic rationality to all domains of society.49 The question of how and why actors will break, disengage from, ignore, or neglect their relationships is all the more interesting because there is powerful empirical evidence that actors in general are “loss averse,” meaning50 they will go through great efforts not to lose something they already have or can have. In fact, as chapters 2 and 3 show, in hyperconnective polities actors easily and regularly overcome loss aversion through the convergence of market, technology, and consumer forces. “Negative choice” is as powerful and present in the lives of people in hyperconnective modernity as was the positive choice to form bonds and relations with others in the formation of modernity.
The social effects of negative choice are apparent in many significant ways. One is the fact that many countries cannot maintain their populations in terms of their birth rates. Young Japanese, for example, have tremendous difficulties “in pairing up,” with the result that “the fertility rate has plunged. The number of children a Japanese woman can expect to have in her lifetime is now 1.42, down from 2.13 in 1970.”51 Negative population growth rates are observed in Eastern and much of Western Europe as well, and they are threatening not only demography but economy as well. The shrinkage of the population has powerful rippling political and economic effects, from immigration flows to the difficulty of guaranteeing pension funds or supporting aging populations. If the expansion of capitalism was predicated on population growth and on the family as the structure mediating between economy and society, that connection is increasingly being undone by the new forms of capitalism themselves. Capitalism is a formidable machine to produce goods but is no longer capable of ensuring the social need for reproduction, what philosopher Nancy Fraser has called capitalism “crisis of care.”52 Negative relations are apparent in the conscious decision or non-conscious practices by many men and women not to enter stable bonds or have children and in the fact that single households have considerably increased in the last two decades.53 A second way in which negative choice is made apparent is by the development of divorce rates. In the United States, for example, the rate more than doubled between 1960 and 1980.54 In 2014 it was more than 45 percent for people who married in the 1970s or in the 1980s,55 making divorce a likely occurrence in a large portion of the population. Third, more people live in multiple relationships (of the polyamorous or other types), putting into question the centrality of monogamy and attendant values as loyalty and long-term commitment. An increasing number of people leave and enter, enter and leave a larger number of relationships in a fluid way throughout their lives. A fourth, seemingly opposite, manifestation of non-choice is sologamy, the puzzling phenomenon of (mostly) women who choose to marry themselves,56 thereby declaring their self-love and affirming the worth of singlehood. Finally, negative choice is somehow implicated in what a commentator has called the “loneliness epidemic”: “An estimated 42.6 million Americans over the age of 45 suffer from chronic loneliness, which significantly raises their risk for premature death, according to a study by AARP (American Association of Retired Persons).57 One researcher called58 the loneliness epidemic59 “a greater health threat than obesity.”60 The loneliness epidemic has another form. As Jean Twenge (a psychology professor at San Diego State University) has suggested, members of the iGen generation (the generation after the millennials) have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations, making the lack of sexuality a new social phenomenon, explained I would argue, by the cultural shift to negative choice, to the quick withdrawal from relationships or to the fact that relationships themselves never get formed.61
In the realm of intimate relationships,