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Dating as a Marketplace
There is a tendency these days to speak of dating as a marketplace and individuals as having high or low value. This has, to some extent, always been the case (with dowries and bride prices), however, along with what David Harvey calls the ‘financialization of everything’, even the affective domain of love — which has always stood outside the economic dictates of marriage and the whorehouse — is being swallowed up into this discussion of market value.
In response to this, and in continuation of our discussion on Roger Scruton’s The Death-Devoted Heart (here and here), I’d like to point to an important distinction Scruton makes in regard to one line from Wagner’s libretto, when Isolde says Tristan ‘looked into my eyes’. According to Scruton, the ‘text and the music deftly remind us of a singular fact: that we look at inanimate objects, and we look at human limbs, but we look into someone’s eyes, and every such look is compromising, fraught with significance, a face-to-face encounter with the other, and therefore a summons to hate or to love’.
No doubt, mediating these encounters with screens diminishes this. Scruton would say that it ‘seeks to bypass the complex negotiation of the face, hands, voice, and posture, voids desire of its intentionality and replaces it with a pursuit of the sexual commodity, which can always be had for a price’.
