The Conscious Uncoupling of Gwyneth Paltrow

There are unconscious couplings, and there are conscious couplings, and there are unconscious uncouplings.

And then, there is Gwyneth Paltrow: the conscious uncoupler.

Though it sounds like something from the pen of L. Ron Hubbard, conscious uncoupling isn't dianetics. It's evidently diaeresis -- Gwyneth has analyzed the possible ways of coupling and uncoupling, made a scientific classification and announced the fact.

The analysis gets trickier, though, because Gwyneth announced the conscious uncoupling on her (somehow eponymous) web site GOOP -- which promptly though unconsciously uncoupled itself from the rest of the Internet as the traffic flooded in. As of the present moment, it hasn't yet recoupled -- though in fairness to GOOP, "recoupling" isn't an explicit part of Gwyneth's cosmology.

Posting the announcement of her conscious uncoupling on her lifestyle web site serves an obvious didactic function. Conscious uncoupling is a part of her recommended lifestyle. But the lifestyle she recommends has brought regular and well-deserved mocking precisely for its being unachievable. The lifestyle web site is a sort of external conscience-soothing project by which Gwyneth assures herself that the lifestyle of a movie star isn't distant or inaccessible. It's right there, for the conscious gwynethizer. Try as one might to couple consciously with the stylistic image Gwyneth projects, it's inaccessible -- and so one is doomed to unwilling and very likely unconscious uncoupling.

Conscious uncoupling is thus part of an inimitable lifestyle. As their announcement indicates, the decision to uncouple consciously was a conscious mutual decision made in partial union and partial separation. The announcement, while proclaiming the adherence of "Gwyneth & Chris" to a relationship conducted "privately," moves out of privacy to the most public possible forum. Conscious coupling is the stuff of bedrooms monitored only by God and the national security agencies; conscious coupling occurs only in private. At the moment of conscious uncoupling, though, the dyad is split, and off float "Gwyneth & Chris" -- united only in signature, and in coparentage.

Everywhere one looks, "Gwyneth & Chris" then still appear, only to remind you of the conscious separation.

But Gwyneth and Chris have done more than provide occasion for flights of interpretive fancy. They have dumped a cold bucket of ice on the mythology of agency which underlies the modern institution of no-fault divorce. The modern marriage is premised upon the full consent of two rational parties who, in spite of a multitude of other options including the option not to marry, have consented to enter into a temporary alliance. There can be no disparity of power, no "need" for one party to marry. Marriage also cannot remedy concupiscence, since the "negative" term concupiscence implies some fault, however remote, and the legitimacy of only some remedies. Nor can one party be mature and the other immature; for the gentleman as well as for the lady, only a fully conscious decision after the rational or pseudorational elimination of alternatives. Marriage must be the conscious coupling.

Gwyneth's proclamation about "conscious uncoupling" is thus not about coupling at all. It is about consciousness and the appearance of choice. Even in this lie of a phrase, Gwyneth unwittingly undercuts the mythology of "drives" which supposedly underlies the Nietzschean revolution in morals. We were supposed to seek liberation because the life of conformity was a false imposition over unconquerable drives. But in the end we want to choose the irrational rationally, a fully conscious decision such that invincible ignorance is impossible.

However powerful this unintended critique may be, the truth about Gwyneth's lie is much simpler, and is evident from its context: the inaccessible lifestyle of GOOP. Though Gwyneth may have been able to uncouple consciously, you cannot. For you, the uncoupling is unconscious: if modern divorcées divorced consciously, after all, Gwyneth would have no need to point out the obvious social fact in such a startling phrase. The startling phrase indicates, though, that no one does it.

And neither does Gwyneth: the core of her lie. Gwyneth & Chris say that they have sought "to see what might have been possible between us." They did not make a conscious decision to make something, but sought to see whether it was on offer in the unconscious. Yet after their conscious decision, they are bizarrely "closer than we have ever been" -- an unconscious reunion after the conscious separation. Assaulted from both sides, the supposed "conscious uncoupling" yields to the permanency of the family now broken by its own founders.

Suppose, though, that marriage, while entered into freely, need not rise to the level of "conscious coupling" or of modern rationality. Since "conscious uncoupling" is manifestly impossible -- it is but another Paltrovian stylistic feint -- why demand consciousness of the initial coupling? When consciousness, here a code for liberated rationality, operates first it cannot be put to the side. It maintains its pride of place, and in spite of the search for an unconscious ground to coupling -- "to see what might have been possible" -- none can be found that rises to the standard of reason. Hence the unconscious uncoupling which masquerades as conscious. It is in the most seemingly earnest phrases of postmodernity that our unacknowledged guilt is most evident.

It is the earlier system, with its ban on divorce, that gives the truer honor to human desires, human madness and human weakness. For while it supposes that men and women enter marriage freely but madly, it restrains the reason and thus educates it. Unconscious and conscious coupling are not, in fact, opposed. The Paltrovian diaeresis is false. But the condition of its falsity is that the core right, the core liberal right must be rejected. No exit.

The Marketing of Private Drones

I keep meaning to return to the topics of some prior posts, but haven’t yet had the time to write up anything worthwhile.  In the meantime, I thought I’d bring this to your attention.  This sort of thing – drone privatization, that is – has been seen before in other forms, and was probably inevitable.  But I thought that the incorporation of a private drone... er... “flying companion” by Renault in a new concept vehicle was interesting:

http://techland.time.com/2014/02/07/would-buy-concept-car-launches-flying-drone-to-scout-traffic/

Obviously, this is a concept car only, and thus will probably never reach production; it is highly unlikely that we will see "flying companions" above the roads anytime soon.  Thus, as is the case with most concept cars, it is more about brand image and marketing than it is about practicality or transportation.  What is interesting, I suppose, is that the designers and marketers at Renault - at least, if we may momentarily treat their remarks in the video advertisement as genuine - seem to think that having a drone in/around your car is something that will appeal to the youth market.  The youth, who, as we are constantly reminded by anxious automakers and triumphalist urbanists everywhere, seem for whatever reason to be less inclined to drive a car than prior generations.  And the design features read as though they had been devised by someone who had spent far too much time reading pop-journalism/market research about “Millennials”: a compact-ish vehicle (because Millennials like cities and hate global warming!) with modest off-road capabilities (because Millennials like the outdoors!) and eye- and headline-catching futurist features (because Millennials like technology!).

The drone serves no real transportation function.  The assertion is made that it will scout ahead to investigate traffic, presumably enabling the driver of the vehicle to change course in order to avoid obstacles.  But this is redundant, because our satellites already do this for us.  We can already find out about upcoming traffic problems through our Internet-enabled mobile devices and through the GPS navigation system on or in our car's dashboard.  And they do it far more thoroughly than a single flying drone ever could.

The only transportation function for this drone which I can imagine, in fact, is to monitor one's own vehicle from the air, perhaps providing useful information about relevant vehicular movements and road conditions in the event of an accident, in the vein of the Russian dash-cam.

 
But, of course, as the column and video both suggest, the drone is also envisioned as taking photographs of your vehicle on the road which can then be uploaded to Insta-Gram.  The installation of the drone by the engineer-marketers at Renault, then, will enable the driver also to "market" himself as technophilic drone-owner via social media.  And so this is far from being something that actually, you know, helps the driver get to his destination (why would anyone want that in a car?).  Instead, the drone is simply a further manifestation of the vicious symbiosis between corporate branding and personal branding that has always been a feature of capitalist marketing.  Only now, via electronic surveillance and social media, shifted from the real to the virtual.

I suppose that it is somewhat ironic that, in spite of the many areas in which private drones might conceivably serve some genuine purpose, what we get instead is an unnecessary “flying companion” used to move (i.e, sell) vehicles.

One final thought about the politics of technological naturalization.  We have, for several years now, been having a halfhearted public debate about the role of government drones for both surveillance and killing.  That is, we as a people seem to be somewhat uncomfortable with our drone use, but not quite uncomfortable enough to do anything about it.  What is notable here is the way in which this sort of drone has the potential to acclimate to overt aerial surveillance a public that is not quite ready for it.  Note that the marketers have clearly decided that “drone” is a bad word, with negative associations in the public mind, and thus they have decided on the euphemism “flying companion” here.  It’s not really a robot spy-cam, it’s like a pet!  Our phones, social media pages, etc. induced a kind of acceptance of monitoring which would not have existed before the advent of these technologies.  In the 1990s, I suspect, if the U. S. government had proposed to GPS tag everyone in the country, the population would have revolted (at least figuratively).  But now we carry our GPS tags in our pockets, and the government simply collects this data, which we not only willingly hand over, but actually pay money to provide to our mobile-phone company.  The difference is: our GPS-enabled telephones perform real, useful functions which they could not otherwise; even our Face Book accounts serve some genuine purpose.  It is not clear to me, at present, whether drones of this sort are capable of clearing that bar.  Will they be useful enough to get the people to adopt them en masse, and thereby accept this new layer of surveillance as a fact of life and/or a necessary evil, or will they remain simply a novelty and have no real impact on public opinion or the culture as a whole?  Given what Renault has shown us, the latter still seems more likely.  But who can tell for certain the shape of things to come?