CHAPTER 1 ENOCOUNTERS OF INTIMACY AND ECONOMYRead more at location 157
Note: il caso: p. e m. sono da tempo compagni - anche se formalmente lei è la sua schiava - ma nn possono farsi doni x la legge della luisiana.... ancora oggi la natura della relazione fa nascere diritti e doveri economici implicito che solo il tribunale esplicita... attacco alle torri gemelle. a chi spetta il risarcimento federale destinato alle vitime? alle mogli ormai separate di fatto? alle notorie amanti? il caso della compagna lesbica penalizzata in favore del fratello.... cosa si vuol dimostrare? che l intimità costruisce relazioni economiche implicite le due dimensioni nn sono affatto separate sebbene sia buona norma nn mischiarle in modo esplicito.... oggi sappiamo che nella relazione intima si contratta eccome. bisogna capire xchè lo si fa nin modi così particolari... cos è l intimità? implica conosfenza profonda e relazione intensa con l altro. grande attenzoone all altro... include: conoscenza dei segreti del corpo e costruzione di rituali xsonalizzati. un linguaggio personale e un accettazione dei difetti anche fisici. assenza d imbarazzo x cose imbarazzanti. fiducia.... si tratta di definizioni vaghe che includono relazioni diversissime dal figlio/genitore al boss/segretaria.... una distinzione: 1) relazioni che possono produrre danni informativi 2 o danni affettivi. tuttavia è più pertinente considerarle in un continum... c è chi definisce l i. in base alle emozioni che evoca. ma sono troppe e ttropo variegate... costante: chi ha una relazione intima - x es di natura sessuale - ci tiene ad etichettarla. forse x regolare meglio i flussi di denaro? ... come pagare lo psicologo? l ordine è particolarmente attento a consigliare forme mediate x nn danneggiare il vincolo. ma tutta la relazione è codificata dalla deontologia. come si spigano distinguo tanto particolareggiati?... prima risposta: bisogna distinguere due sfrre quella intima e quella economica affinche il conflitto sia relegato nella seconda senza inquinare la prima. ci sono due mondi nettamente separati: affettività e calcolo economico. il contatto tra le due crea inquinamento e corrompe la morale. l es. di michael walzer fred hirsch. e anche l i. può contaminare l economia. slo un mercato ripulito dai sentimenti genera efficienza. capitalismo: sia i critici che i sostenitori concordano che espelle il solidarismo. friedman e la responsabilità sociale dell impresa: teniamo ben distinte le due sfere. chi nn lo fa si condanna a corruzione mafia corporativismo. rifkin e l ipercapiralusmo: il mercato oggi è puro e nn più temprato da forme relazionali. seconda risposta: nn c è reale distinzione ma solo una normale conrattazione di mercato in cui si etichetta la relazione x regolarne le conseguenze... intimità e denaro spesso viaggiano insieme: baby sitter adozione asili doni in denaro al matrimonio rimesse emigranti prestiti tra amici eredità. relazioni e denaro... riduzionismo economicista (pragmatismo): anche il sentimento ha una sua razionalità economica che può essere smascherata. l economicismo ha portato il più serio attacco alla teorie dei mondi contrapposti... posner: il paradigma law and economics applicato alla sessualità: scava scava la sessualità funziona come la borsa... david friedman: i contratti a lungo termine funzionano x il matrimonio come x le imprese... x gli economicisti la prostituzione è un mero scambio di mercato... x i culturalisti (costruttivisti) tutto è ideologia. la prostituzione esprime un isola di pluralismo della sessualità che contesta l egemonia del matrimonio. in qs senso basta l idea: è concepibile protituz. senza sesso... x i politicisti tutto è sete di dominio e il potere spiega anche le relazioni. l analisi del patriarcato appartiene a qs costola... x i politicisti la prostituzione esprime il dominio dell uomo... terza risposta: nn c è distinzione e nemmeno contrattazione ma un tentativo di connettersi in modo appropriato con l altro... anche la seconda soluzione sembrerebbe mantenere le due sfere ben distinte anche se suggerisce un meccanismo ipocrita x connetterle... tesi: noi dedichiamo molte energie a costruire la relazione più appropriata con l altro. anche gli scambi di denaro servono a qs: è un dono? è un compenso? è un corrispettivo? se la relazione conta la modalità nn conta meno della quantità. le due sfere nn sono separate ma nemmeno tutto può essere ridotto ad economicsmo... obiettivo: max connessione ottimale. una buona relazione è un bene in sè e va considerato come tale nel bilancio complessivo. l economicista la considera invece solo uno strumento... noi costruiamo la relazione con: nomi pratiche simboli rituali... nn esiste la relazione ottimale a cui tutte devono tendere ma esiste un mix ottimale di relazioni che dipende dalle preferenze del singolo... l attività economica è uno dei tanti contesti in cui prosegue qs incessante lavoro di costruzione... connettersi in modo appropriato riduce l incertezza (imho: ma qui siamo ancora nell ambito della razionalità economica)... il xicolo di confusione rafforza l attività rituale di marcamento dei confini... imho: la connessioe appropriata crea una rete che dà sicurezza. ma xchè allora nn stipulare dei contratti? forse xchè essendo contratti di lungo xiodo e necessariamente incompleti c è di meglio. l adesione a certi rituali offre più garanzie di compliance ed enforcement. in qs senso i comportamenti nn sono meno razionali ma nn utilizzano gli strumenti tipici dell economia. diciamo che hanno una razionalità culturale più che economica.. il grado d intimità è un buon misuratore della relazione. una valvola utilizzata nella regolazione... l opera di demarcamento è spesso impotente senza il contributo istituzionale. x es. il matrimonio... a volte si adotta la retorica dei mondi ostili nn xchè ci sicrede realmente ma sempre in vista di configurare al meglio le relazioni... rituali simboli e altri medium configuramo una semantica del denaro... oggi il denaro è xvasivo e la sua presenza deve essere fronteggiata da chi s impegna a connettere la sua vita. i sostenitori dei due mondi sono preoccupati. 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Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ OBBLIGHI E RELAZIONI..DEFINIZIONE INTIM ITÀ. SACRALISTI. ECONOMICISTI. RELAZIONALISTI. OPPRESSIONISTI. MARCARE CONFINI. RIDURRE INCERTEZZA. Edit
While acknowledging that Miller gave Patsy the promissory notes and that she sold them to Cole, the family claimed that Patsy had no legal or moral right to the notes. If the family’s claim was correct, Cole himself therefore did not have legal ownership of the notes. The case pivoted on the relationship between Miller and Patsy: was she Miller’s slave? Was she his concubine? Or were they essentially man and wife? If a slave, under Louisiana law she could legally receive no gifts at all. As a concubine, she could only receive the equivalent of one-tenth of the value of her lover’s estate in movables, but no immovables. If his wife, she could receive any gift whatsoever. The Catahoula jury ruled that the gift was legal because Patsy was already free at the time she received the promissory notes.Read more at location 175
Again, notice what is happening: except for some questions about dates, no one was disputing that Miller and Patsy had lived together or that Miller had given her the notes. The critical question was what relationship they hadRead more at location 184
The disabilities under which the law places persons who have lived in this condition, are created for the maintenance of good morals, of public order, and for the preservation of the best interests of society”Read more at location 187
Thus, the court inserted a condemnation of interracial concubinage into a judgment concerning domicile.Read more at location 189
The couple had lived together for some time, and trusted friends knew of their connection. In fact, the court described their relationship as “open and notorious.”Read more at location 191
Courts still judge bitter disputes about economic rights and obligations established by competing personal relationships.Read more at location 195
competing claims of siblings on their parents’ estates, lovers versus estranged spouses, relatives against close friends, and more.Read more at location 196
Settlements for victims of Al-Qaeda’s 2001 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon raised a surprising range of legal questions in exactly this vein.Read more at location 198
At times, spouses, parents, children, siblings, and lovers all claimed to be the fund’s rightful beneficiaries.Read more at location 203
These claims became especially contentious in the cases of unmarried but cohabiting couples, estranged spouses, and same-sex households.Read more at location 204
McAneney and her lesbian partner, Margaret Cruz, had lived together for almost twenty years. New York State, as a way of dealing with the 9/11 tragedy, recognized such domestic partnerships;Read more at location 206
That mixing perplexes observers because of a common belief that economic rationality and intimate ties contradict each other,Read more at location 230
American law has trouble with those relations because it harbors some of the same suspicions concerning the compatibility of economic calculations with interpersonal solidarityRead more at location 232
The evidence shows, on one side, that over a wide variety of circumstances people do in fact negotiate the coexistence of economic interchange and intimate social relations. On the other side, however, it shows that maintaining their coexistence calls up a series of distinctions, defenses, and beliefs exerting substantial social power.Read more at location 244
Money ultimately consists not of dollar bills but of accounting systems—those systems that produce equivalence among goods, services, and titles to them, plus the media used to represent value within the systems.Read more at location 264
particularized knowledge received, and attention provided by,Read more at location 276
shared secrets, interpersonal rituals, bodily information, awareness of personal vulnerability, and shared memory of embarrassing situations.Read more at location 278
private languages, emotional support, and correction of embarrassing defects.Read more at location 279
It also extends to the varying degrees and types of intimacy involved in the relations between psychiatrist-patient, lawyer-client, priest-parishioner, servant-employer, prostitute-customer, spy–object of espionage, bodyguard-tycoon, child-care worker–parent, boss-secretary, janitor-tenant, personal trainer–trainee, and hairdresser-customer.Read more at location 286
All these relations, moreover, generate their own forms of economic transfers.Read more at location 289
Kenneth Karst, for example, introduces a distinction between two types of intimacy. The first involves transfer of possibly damaging private information from one party to the other, information not typically available to third parties. The second entails close enduring relations between two people.Read more at location 291
In fact, intimate relations come in many more than two varieties.Read more at location 297
Drawing a continuum from impersonal to intimate helps us avoid some common, morally tinged confusions in these regards: intimacy as emotion, intimacy as caring attention, intimacy as authenticity, and intimacy as an intrinsic good.Read more at location 307
Abusive sexual relations, for example, are certainly intimate, but not caring.Read more at location 313
simulation of feelings and meanings sometimes becomes an obligation, or at least a service, in some sorts of relationships. Just consider intimate relations between adult children and their aging parents, or between nurses and their terminally ill patients.Read more at location 323
As we will see, relations of sexual intimacy frequently include transfers of money. Those involved, however, are careful to establish whether the relationship is a marriage, courtship, prostitution, or some other different sort of social tie.Read more at location 332
Trading clinical services for other items, such as goods or services, although not illegal or necessarily unethical, complicates treatment and increases the probability of boundary and transference-countertransference problems.Read more at location 345
What explains the proliferation of distinctions, practices, stories, and moral injunctions concerning the interplay of economic transactions and intimacy? Why do participants, critics, moralists, jurists, and observers worry so much about finding the “right” sort of compensation for their various intimate relations?Read more at location 370
SEPARATE SPHERES ? HOSTILE WORLDS?Read more at location 373
A first group, the most numerous, have long proposed the twin ideas of “separate spheres and hostile worlds”: distinct arenas for economic activity and intimate relations,Read more at location 374
A second, smaller group has answered “nothing-but”: far from constituting an encounter between two contradictory principles, the mingling of economic activity and intimacy, properly seen, is nothing but another version of normal market activity, nothing but a form of cultural expression, or nothing but an exercise of power.Read more at location 376
A far smaller third cluster—to which I belong—has replied that both of the first two positions are wrong, that people who blend intimacy and economic activity are actively engaged in constructing and negotiating “Connected Lives.”Read more at location 378
On one side, we discover a sphere of sentiment and solidarity; on the other, a sphere of calculation and efficiency.Read more at location 382
Contact between them produces moral contamination. Monetization of personal care,Read more at location 384
The doctrine of hostile worlds rests (sometimes invisibly) on the doctrine of separate spheres. Intimacy only thrives, accordingly, if people erect effective barriers around it.Read more at location 385
insisting that the introduction of economic calculations into intimate relations would corruptRead more at location 388
Love and sex, Michael Walzer tells us, belong prominently among those “blocked exchanges”:Read more at location 391
Fred Hirsch more pungently warns: “orgasm as a consumer’s right rather rules it out as an ethereal experience”Read more at location 394
Murray Davis puts it thus: Sex for money . . . muddles the distinction between our society’s sexual system and its economic system.Read more at location 395
In fact, the feared contamination runs in both directions: according to the hostile worlds view, intimacy can also contaminate rational economic behaviorRead more at location 400
Workplaces, as James Woods has shown, are typically constructed as asexual spheresRead more at location 402
Such worries about the incompatibility, incommensurability, or contradiction between intimate and impersonal relations are longstanding and persistent.Read more at location 408
Only markets cleansed of sentiment can generate true efficiency.Read more at location 412
both advocates and critics of industrial capitalism adopted the assumption that industrial rationality was expelling solidarity,Read more at location 414
Given dichotomous theories of sentiment and rationality, the new organizational forms presented an acute puzzle: wouldn’t such new ways of doing business eventually suffer inefficiency, cronyism, and corruption precisely because they breached boundaries between rationality and sentiment?Read more at location 429
Robert Kuttner’s provocative analysis of contemporary markets. “As the market vogue has gained force,” worries Kuttner in Everything for Sale, “realms that used to be tempered by extra-market norms and institutions are being marketized with accelerating force” (Kuttner 1997: 55). This “relentless encroachment of the market and its values” he claims, “turns the shallow picture of economic man into a self-fulfilling prophecy”Read more at location 436
Rifkin argues that the world of “hypercapitalism,” with its instantaneous transfers of money and information, is accelerating and aggravating the substitution of market transactions for genuine human relationships.Read more at location 440
Hostile worlds doctrines are alive and well in the twenty-first century.Read more at location 447
Social scientists, social critics, and ordinary economic actors all recognize as a practical matter—if not necessarily as a matter of principle—that food stamps, subway tokens, local currencies, and commercial paper all qualify somehow as varieties of money but circulate within restricted circuits rather than merging into a single homogeneous medium.Read more at location 454
recognize how regularly intimate social transactions coexist with monetary transactions: parents pay nannies or child-care workers to tend their children, adoptive parents pay money to obtain babies, divorced spouses pay or receive alimony and child support payments, and parents give their children allowances, subsidize their college educations, help them with their first mortgage, and offer them substantial bequests in their wills.Read more at location 461
Friends and relatives send gifts of money as wedding presents, and friends loan each other money.Read more at location 464
All these payments, and more, commonly occur in the company of intimate transactions,Read more at location 471
I argue, first, that people engage routinely in the process of differentiating meaningful social relations, including their most intimate ties. They undertake relational work. Among other markers, they use different payment systems—media—to create, define, affirm, challenge, or overturn such distinctions.Read more at location 474
They argue, for example, over distinctions among payments as compensation, entitlements, or gifts.Read more at location 478
They adopt symbols, rituals, practices, and physically distinguishable forms of money to mark distinct social relations.Read more at location 482
across a wide range of intimate relations, people manage to integrate monetary transfers into larger webs of mutual obligations without destroying the social ties involved. Money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it.Read more at location 485
So are hostile worlds pure inventions? Examined carefully, hostile worlds arguments cannot simply be dismissed as fantasies.Read more at location 487
people regularly invoke hostile worlds doctrines when they are trying to establish or maintain boundaries between intimate relations that might easily be confused, for example, when a father employs a daughter in his firm, or when a lawyer handles his old friend’s divorce. In such circumstances, participants often employ hostile worlds practices, using forms of speech, body language, clothing, uniforms, and spatial locations to signify whether the relationshipRead more at location 489
They thus prevent confusion with the “wrong” relationship.Read more at location 493
we need a better account of how people construct and negotiate their social relations: the connected lives alternative.Read more at location 498
critics have sometimes countered separate spheres and hostile worlds accounts with reductionist nothing but arguments: the ostensibly separate world of intimate social relations, they argue, is nothing-but a special case of some general principle.Read more at location 500
for economic reductionists caring, friendship, sexuality, and parent-child relations become special cases of advantage- seeking individual choice under conditions of constraint—in short, of economic rationality.Read more at location 503
For cultural reductionists, intimate relations become expressions of distinct beliefs or ideological scripts,Read more at location 504
Others insist on the political, coercive, and exploitative bases of the same phenomena.Read more at location 505
Across social science as a whole, economic reductionism has provided the most coherent and powerful challenge to separate spheres and hostile worlds views.Read more at location 508
That category is exemplified by Richard Posner, who in the tradition of Gary Becker,Read more at location 509
Posner has championed the influential “law and economics” paradigm and pioneered its extension to sexuality.Read more at location 510
is a commonplace that sexual passion belongs to the domain of the irrational;Read more at location 514
Similarly, David Friedman, another “law and economics” enthusiast, explains why long-term contracts work as efficiently for marriageRead more at location 517
Nothing-but cultural theorists, in contrast, replace efficiency, rationality, and exchange with meaning, discourse, and symbolism.Read more at location 525
Noah Zatz’s analysis of the prostitution exchange as “a site of powerful sexual pluralism, capable of contesting hegemonic constructions of sexuality that at first seem far removed:Read more at location 527
Zatz argues that prostitution has no necessary connection to genitalia or to sexual gratification:Read more at location 530
A third influential nothing-but analysis holds that intimate relations are nothing but the result of coercive, and more specifically patriarchal, power structures.Read more at location 532
Kathleen Barry’s analysis of the “prostitution of sexuality,” for instance, derives women’s sexual subordination from “gender relations of sexual power” (Barry 1995: 78). Commercialized sex, as in prostitution, from this perspective is no different from unpaid sex in rape,Read more at location 533
Common interpretations of the intersection between economic interchange and intimate relations, as we see, range from the moral concerns of hostile worlds theorists to the pragmatism of nothing-but economic views, the constructivism of nothing-but culturalists, and the political critique of nothing-but power analysts.Read more at location 536
In some respects, nothing-but accounts improve on hostile worlds formulations.Read more at location 540
people create connected lives by differentiating their multiple social ties from each other, marking boundariesRead more at location 547
we mark differences between ties with distinctive names, symbols, practices, and media of exchange;Read more at location 553
economic activities of production, consumption, distribution, and asset transfers play significant parts in most such relations.Read more at location 555
Ties themselves vary from intimate to impersonal and from durable to fleeting. But almost all social settings contain mixtures of ties that differ in these regards.Read more at location 559
My analysis of intersections between intimacy and economic transactions stems from a more general view of interpersonal relations.Read more at location 564
In most such relations, institutional supports, widely shared definitions, and coaching by third parties reduce uncertainty and negotiation concerning meanings, rules, and boundaries;Read more at location 567
when relations resemble others that have significantly different consequences for the parties, people put extra effort into distinguishing the relations, marking their boundaries,Read more at location 570
As we will see later, even if they engage in sexual intercourse, courting couples commonly take great care to establish that their relationship is not that of prostitute and client.Read more at location 571
they seek to expand or contract the degree of intimacyRead more at location 583
People devote significant effort to negotiating meanings of social relations and marking their boundaries.Read more at location 584
people erect a boundary, mark the boundary by means of names and practices, establish a set of distinctive understandings and practicesRead more at location 595
Within the legal arena, a parallel but stylized matching of social relations, understandings, practices, transactions, and media occurs.Read more at location 598
Hostile worlds ideas and practices emerge from the effort to mark and defend boundaries between categories of relations that contain some common elements, could be confused, and would threaten existing relations of trust if confused.Read more at location 601
Consider what husband-wife relations take for granted: among other things, an income tax code distinguishing between single and married people; businesses that provide special perquisites for spouses; and couples’ memberships in health clubs.Read more at location 605
In fact, such relations only survive with institutional supports.Read more at location 607
Consider for instance auctions, which economists often proclaim as the purest type of impersonal process, efficiently matching individual preferences of buyers and sellers. Charles Smith’s observations (1989) of actual auctions have shown that a vast set of institutional connections and conventionsRead more at location 608
One dimension of variation in social relations does run from intimate to impersonal.Read more at location 612
We are, then, dealing with connections among four elements: relations, transactions, media, and boundaries. Relations consist of durable, named sets of understandings, practices, rights, and obligations that link two or more persons. Transactions consist of bounded, short-term interactions between persons. Media consist of accounting systems and their tokens. Boundaries consist, in this case, of known perimeters drawn around distinctive combinations of relations, transactions, and media.Read more at location 618
authorities have built their own templates of social relations and their boundaries into enforceable obligations and rights.Read more at location 640
with the expansion of monetized markets,Western legal systems did shift increasingly to monetary valuation, retribution, and compensation.Read more at location 645
However confusedly, then, critics of commodification are pointing to some changes that actually occurred. Within the law, monetary standards of loss and gain have become increasingly prominent.Read more at location 651
questions as whether an adult wage earner’s death deserves greater compensation than that of a dependent child or an aged person have weighed more heavily in legal disputes.Read more at location 652
goods and services available for money has expanded enormously during the last two centuries; widespread commodification really has happened.Read more at location 654
Where people produce most goods and services outside of organized market economies, their variable monetary incomes and access to monetary capital do not necessarily determine whether they thrive or suffer.Read more at location 656
Monetiza-tion does not in itself corrupt moral life. But it moves moral questions increasingly into the arena of cash and carry.Read more at location 660
change.We must recognize that hostile worlds disputes frequently involve questions of justice, inequality, power, and exploitation.Read more at location 663
Even if (as some economists proclaim) the overall operation of such markets produces efficiency in the sense of greater output per capita for equivalent inputs, whole categories of people walk away with lesser qualities of life. Reformers and radicals often respond to these circumstances with a hostile worlds conclusion: markets corrupt.Read more at location 667
This book challenges the widespread assumption that markets ipso facto undercut solidarity-sustaining personal relations.Read more at location 678
The following chapters draw extensively on American legal disputes.Read more at location 683
I selected a set of exceptionally well-documented cases that illustrate the range of variation in disputes conjoining contested economic transactions and intimate relations.Read more at location 701
Instead, The Purchase of Intimacy concentrates on demonstrating parallels and contrasts between the treatment of intimate economies in everyday life and in the legal arena.Read more at location 707
