Love and discipline: The cultural constitution of romantic love

In recent theoretical debates in the sociology of culture, culture is conceptualized on the lines of two primary distinctions: as the unity of semantic and structural relations and as the unity of system and practice. In both cases, the two sides of the distinction are understood as mutually sustaining and conditioning, i.e., as constituting a unity whose heteronomous moments cannot be subjected to causal sequencing or logical reduction. Part I outlines an approach to cultural analysis that combines both conceptual approaches into a single methodological framework: It argues that while semantic relations and social structure are analytically distinct, their respective moments converge irreducibly in the meaningful structure of experiences and practices. While instantiations of meaning are necessarily diachronic, they are informed by double-reference to a synchronic background provided by the unity of semantic and structural relations. The aim of analysis consists in the reconstruction of this background, in short: culture, from the diachronic accounts and expressions that provide the data for analysis.; In Part II, through the cultural analysis of a novel, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), and in Part III, of a self-help book, Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages (1995), the cultural logics of the principal four understandings of romantic love in western societies are illustrated and explained by relating semantic differences in their conceptualization, which manifest themselves in the perceptions and expressions of the texts' characters, to the structuration of the social world, which is opened up by the texts' non-ostensive social references. The two sources are ideally suited for purposes of comparative cultural analysis, because each text features a paradigmatic tension between two rival conceptions of love that may be regarded as ideal-typical opposites: idealizing and intimate love in The Age of Innocence and therapeutic and altruistic love in The Five Love Languages. By introducing a historical dimension into the analysis, the semantic orientation of these four amorous phenotypes is considered more broadly, as differential adaptations to large-scale social transformations that have altered the dynamics of amorous interaction in their respective cultural environments.