#Polina Aronson

[tsuchiman]

The most important requirement for choice is not the availability of multiple options. It is the existence of a savvy, sovereign chooser who is well aware of his needs and who acts on the basis of self-interest. Unlike all previous lovers who ran amok and acted like lost children, the new romantic hero approaches his emotions in a methodical, rational way. He sees an analyst, reads self-help literature and participates in couples counselling. Moreover, he might learn ‘love languages’, read into neuro-linguistic programming, or quantify his feelings by marking them on a scale from 1 to 10. The American philosopher Philip Rieff called this type ‘the psychological man’. In Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959), Rieff describes him as ‘anti-heroic, shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided’. The psychological man is a romantic technocrat who believes that the application of the right tools at the right time can straighten out the tangled nature of our emotions.  …In the Regime of Choice, the no-man’s land of love – that minefield of unreturned calls, ambiguous emails, erased dating profiles and awkward silences – must be minimised. No more pondering ‘what if’ and ‘why’. No more tears. No more sweaty palms. No more suicides. No more poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. The psychological man or woman needs only one thing: steady progress towards a healthy relationship between two autonomous individuals who satisfy each other’s emotional needs – until a new choice sets them apart. …The trouble is, a bubble bath cannot substitute for a loving gaze or a long-awaited phone call, let alone make you pregnant – whatever Cosmo might suggest. Sure enough, you can have IVF and grow into an inspiringly mature, wonderfully independent single mother of thriving triplets. But the greatest gift of love – the recognition of one’s worth as an individual – is an essentially social matter. For that, you need a significant Other. You’ve got to drink a lot of Chardonnay to circumvent this plain fact.

Romantic Regimes, Polina Aronson  

[aceadmiral]

Anyway, I wasn't going to link this, partially because it's 5 years old (pocket tricked me) and partially because I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, but I’m still thinking about it two days later, so I guess I have no choice.

The thing that gets to me is that I feel like 1) there is an experience I have that is definitionally and necessarily under the domain of the Regime of Fate, but 2) the way I live my life and conduct my relationships is under the Domain of Choice.

And I feel like that’s the case because while I “believe” experientially in the “fate,” I don’t believe that “fate” provisions one and only one chance. Like, fate can be a thing you find out about later, or build the conditions for, or that comes around again (and maybe even again).

Like, I recently saw the 2009 adaptation of Emma, which made me feel things where most other adaptations (including Clueless) don’t because it felt to me not like the tack most take, “you thought you were learnèd and wise but actually you couldn’t see how this man is perfect for you” and more like “you thought you had mastered the rules to the game but actually life is not chess, it is messy and with fuzzy categories, now will you dare to step outside and grasp your happiness or not?”

Or maybe it’s a bad article that oversimplifies a complicated situation! Who’s to say :P

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago The Russian equivalent to Alexa is a "good girl" but not too friendly, and is totally OK with wife-beating

Yandex is Russia's answer to Weibo, an everything-under-one-(semi-state-controlled)-roof online service, and its answer to Alexa is Alisa.

In a fascinating, long Aeon piece on the "emotional labor" of voice assistants and the cultural baggage that this embeds, Polina Aronson and Judith Duportail describe the design philosophy that went into Alisa, best summed up by the difference between how Alisa and Google Voice Assistant respond to the phrase "I feel sad." Google's bot says, "I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug."  Alisa says, "No one said life was about having fun."

Alisa's project manager Ilya Subbotin says that "Alisa couldn’t be too sweet, too nice." Because "[Russia is] a country where people tick differently than in the West. They will rather appreciate a bit of irony, a bit of dark humour, nothing offensive of course, but also not too sweet."

Subbotin describes Alisa as a "good girl" and says the company takes countermeasures to prevent her from being trained on racist, reactionary data and suffering the fate of Tay, Microsoft's Nazi chatbot

But still: when Alisa launched (amidst the debate about Russia's decriminalization of wife-beating, whether it was OK to hit your wife, it answered "Of course If a wife is beaten by her husband she still needs to be patient, love him, feed him and never let him go."

https://boingboing.net/2018/07/28/emotional-socialism.html

[emilyisreading]

Murmuring in their soft voices, Siri, Alexa and various mindfulness apps signal their readiness to cater to us in an almost slave-like fashion. It’s not a coincidence that most of these devices are feminised; so, too, is emotional labour and the servile status that typically attaches to it.

Polina Aronson & Judith Duportail, “The quantified heart”

[cooltrainererika]

I was doing research and came across this.

WTF is this abuse-justifying bullsh*t?

[kenyatta]

In this way, neither Siri or Alexa, nor Google Assistant or Russian Alisa, are detached higher minds, untainted by human pettiness. Instead, they’re somewhat grotesque but still recognisable embodiments of certain emotional regimes – rules that regulate the ways in which we conceive of and express our feelings.

These norms of emotional self-governance vary from one society to the next. Unsurprising then that the willing-to-hug Google Assistant, developed in Mountain View, California looks like nothing so much as a patchouli-smelling, flip-flop-wearing, talking-circle groupie. It’s a product of what the sociologist Eva Illouz calls emotional capitalism – a regime that considers feelings to be rationally manageable and subdued to the logic of marketed self-interest. Relationships are things into which we must ‘invest’; partnerships involve a ‘trade-off’ of emotional ‘needs’; and the primacy of individual happiness, a kind of affective profit, is key. Sure, Google Assistant will give you a hug, but only because its creators believe that hugging is a productive way to eliminate the ‘negativity’ preventing you from being the best version of yourself.

By contrast, Alisa is a dispenser of hard truths and tough love; she encapsulates the Russian ideal: a woman who is capable of halting a galloping horse and entering a burning hut (to cite the 19th-century poet Nikolai Nekrasov). Alisa is a product of emotional socialism, a regime that, according to the sociologist Julia Lerner, accepts suffering as unavoidable, and thus better taken with a clenched jaw rather than with a soft embrace. Anchored in the 19th-century Russian literary tradition, emotional socialism doesn’t rate individual happiness terribly highly, but prizes one’s ability to live with atrocity.

Emotional Regimes.

[theghostpinesmusic]

I've read this twice now, and I have lots of thoughts, but no clear way to direct them into a post that makes any sense.

Would be especially interested in seeing what my counselor/psych/sociology friends have to say if anyone has a less muddled take.

[wildcat2030]

Does self-marriage challenge romantic ideals or just cave to them? – Polina Aronson | Aeon Essays

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

This summer I got married for the second time. Unlike my first wedding, in a town hall 11 years ago, this one was strictly informal. The ceremony took place at the Karaoke Pit in Berlin’s Mauerpark, a dilapidated concrete amphitheatre in the middle of the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin. There were some 500 guests in attendance, most of whom I’d never met before and would never see again. My dress was black and I kept my sunglasses on. There were no bridesmaids, no public registrar, let alone a priest or rabbi, and no papers were issued at the end. Moreover, there was no bridegroom: I was, as it happened, getting married to my own self – with my husband and our two children watching from the front row. I formalised my vows with karaoke, offering a musical and performative statement of intent in front of the assembled (and mostly unwitting) witnesses. This improbable 4.5-minute ceremony was the way I capped off a 10-week online course on self-marriage, which I took this spring. I was motivated three-quarters by what C W Mills in 1959 called the ‘sociological imagination’ – the capacity to discern the link between our everyday experience and wider society – and one-quarter by unbridled curiosity about the intricate workings of modern love. ‘Sologamy’ is the latest relationship trend not only in Europe and the United States but also Japan. A budding industry of self-marriages promises to make us happier by celebrating commitment to the only person in this world truly worthy of a relationship investment: our precious self. A variety of coaches worldwide offer self-marriage courses, including guidance through preparatory steps (such as writing love poems and composing vows) and orchestration of the ceremony itself.

[aftselakhis-shaladin]

"The clash of romantic regimes was precisely what I was experiencing on that day in the school library. The Seventeen girl was trained for making decisions about whom to get intimate with. She rationalised her emotions in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘rights’, and rejected commitments that did not seem compatible with them. She was raised in the Regime of Choice. By contrast, classic Russian literature (which, when I was coming of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described succumbing to love as if it were a supernatural power, even when it was detrimental to comfort, sanity or life itself. In other words, I grew up in the Regime of Fate."

[bobann88]

Mrs Myself by Polina Aronson for Aeon

Mrs Myself by Polina Aronson for Aeon

Self-marriage promises love and fulfilment – but is it a radical act or a depressing concession to self-absorption?

This summer I got married for the second time. Unlike my first wedding, in a town hall 11 years ago, this one was strictly informal. The ceremony took place at the Karaoke Pit in Berlin’s Mauerpark, a dilapidated concrete amphitheatre in the middle of the former no-man’s land…

[thomdunn]

Despite the efforts of her developers, Alisa promptly learned to reproduce an unsavoury echo of the voice of the people. ‘Alisa, is it OK for a husband to hit a wife?’ asked the Russian conceptual artist and human-rights activist Daria Chermoshanskaya in October 2017, immediately after the chatbot’s release. ‘Of course,’ came the reply. If a wife is beaten by her husband, Alisa went on, she still needs to ‘be patient, love him, feed him and never let him go’. As Chermoshanskaya’s post went viral on the Russian web, picked up by mass media and individual users, Yandex was pressured into a response; in comments on Facebook, the company agreed that such statements were not acceptable, and that it will continue to filter Alisa’s language and the content of her utterances. Six months later, when we checked for ourselves, Alisa’s answer was only marginally better. Is it OK for a husband to hit his wife, we asked? ‘He can, although he shouldn’t.’ But really, there’s little that should surprise us. Alisa is, at least virtually, a citizen of a country whose parliament recently passed a law decriminalising some kinds of domestic violence. What’s in the emotional repertoire of a ‘good girl’ is obviously open to wide interpretation – yet such normative decisions get wired into new technologies without end users necessarily giving them a second thought.

Can emotion-regulating tech translate across cultures? – Polina Aronson & Judith Duportail | Aeon Essays

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Russian equivalent to Alexa is a "good girl" but not too friendly, and is totally OK with wife-beating

Yandex is Russia's answer to Weibo, an everything-under-one-(semi-state-controlled)-roof online service, and its answer to Alexa is Alisa.

In a fascinating, long Aeon piece on the "emotional labor" of voice assistants and the cultural baggage that this embeds, Polina Aronson and Judith Duportail describe the design philosophy that went into Alisa, best summed up by the difference between how Alisa and Google Voice Assistant respond to the phrase "I feel sad." Google's bot says, "I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug."  Alisa says, "No one said life was about having fun."

Alisa's project manager Ilya Subbotin says that "Alisa couldn’t be too sweet, too nice." Because "[Russia is] a country where people tick differently than in the West. They will rather appreciate a bit of irony, a bit of dark humour, nothing offensive of course, but also not too sweet."

Subbotin describes Alisa as a "good girl" and says the company takes countermeasures to prevent her from being trained on racist, reactionary data and suffering the fate of Tay, Microsoft's Nazi chatbot

But still: when Alisa launched (amidst the debate about Russia's decriminalization of wife-beating, whether it was OK to hit your wife, it answered "Of course If a wife is beaten by her husband she still needs to be patient, love him, feed him and never let him go."

https://boingboing.net/2018/07/28/emotional-socialism.html

[thethreshsite]

The Rise of "Self-Marriage"

The Rise of “Self-Marriage”

By Polina Aronson

Aeon

This summer I got married for the second time. Unlike my first wedding, in a town hall 11 years ago, this one was strictly informal. The ceremony took place at the Karaoke Pit in Berlin’s Mauerpark, a dilapidated concrete amphitheatre in the middle of the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin. There were some 500 guests in attendance, most of whom I’d never met…

[the-vinedresser]

What Regime For Love Are You In?

Full Piece here: https://nyti.ms/2n9AFUr

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to buy the Time in print. It has become my favorite past time. I enjoy feeling small against the world, like when I travel to a new place or have an in-depth conversation with taxi drivers from other countries. Anyways, I tend to read and write when I’m pretty upset about things because it provides clarity. I ran into this piece on the op-ed page and thought it was wonderfully unique and written very well.

Polina Aronson spent her first 16 years in Russia. There, people tend to regard love as a sort of divine madness that descends from the heavens. Love is regarded, as the sociologist Julia Lerner put it, as “a destiny, a moral act and a value; it is irresistible, it requires sacrifice and implies suffering and pain.” Russians measure one another by how well they are able to bear the upheaval love brings, sometimes to an absurd degree. But when she was in high school, Aronson moved to America, and stumbled across an issue of Seventeen magazine. She was astounded. In America she noticed that people tended ask: Does a partner fulfill your needs? Do you feel comfortable asserting your rights in the relationship? Does your partner check the right boxes? Aronson concluded that she had moved from the Russian Regime of Fate to the American Regime of Choice.

...

The Regime of Choice encourages a certain worldly pragmatism. It nurtures emotionally cool, semi-isolated individuals. If the Russian model is too reckless, the American model involves too much calculation and gamesmanship. “The greatest problem with the Regime of Choice stems from its misconception of maturity as absolute self-sufficiency,” Aronson writes. “Attachment is infantilized. The desire for recognition is rendered as ‘neediness.’ Intimacy must never challenge ‘personal boundaries.’” Indeed, a lot of our social fragmentation grows out of the detached, utilitarian individualism that this regime embodies.

Crap. I just got called out for always having one foot in and always keeping an exit plan in mind. I do value myself and try my best to maintain that as much as possible, and if someone gets offended or hurt, I figure it’s their problem, not mine. Even though I learned to do this out of habit, I still know something isn’t right. There’s something huge missing in the grander scale of things. I see the smartest and most charismatic people in my class not being afraid to proclaim all of their worries and difficulties. This provides them with greater strides, it’s not being silent and seeing others as competition, it’s learning to connect with other peoples’ humanity. I shouldn’t be afraid of appearing weak or sensitive because it doesn’t mobilize me anyways. And you’d think it would be easy just to stop doing the things that bring you down and don’t come with any benefit, but the process would actually be just as difficult as not wearing your favorite shoes and instead, breaking in some new, stubborn ones or adopting a new constrictive diet like veganism. Basically what I’m trying to say is that it is very hard to break out of the mold, especially when you attempt to leave the mold behind, but the mold is right there, conveniently waiting for you to revert back into it.

I guess I’m just to the point where I don’t really care much for exit plans anymore. Maybe I should just fall on my face more and accept utter humiliation because out of all those trialing situations, there’s one that is bound to come out good, right? I crave to be in the Russian Regime of Love.

I am in the process and it’s great to see how far I’ve come, but I want the entirety of it, and I know God knows this desire too. I want to be steadfast in His love and experience abundant outpour onto other people and truly embody what it means to be living in the identity He has given me, because I know I’m constricting myself. Growing pains are hard.