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.
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