Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter March/April, 2000, Vol. 7, Number 2. all about love: New Visions (William Morrow and Company Inc.) 239 pp., $22.00 by bell hooks Reviewed by Amanda Printz

B ell Hooks [bell hooks] first emerged as a fierce and angry social critic who disparaged the voices of pop culture. She criticized the majority of mainstream media (film, literary magazines, etc.) for its promotion of "competitive, atomistic liberal individualism" which, according to Hooks, is unnatural and fundamentally racist, sexist, classist, and oppressive.

In the years following her celebrated book-based and pop culture fame, she turned her critical commentary and activism more towards the feminist movement of the West. Although the subject of her analysis was narrower in scope, her political analysis evolved little. Bell Hooks admonished western feminism as a benefactor of a political ideology whose maintenance depends on the oppression of persons. Therefore, in her view, the western feminist movement is itself a hierarchical movement, a "case study of narcissism, insensitivity, self-indulgence", that is the "critical and analytic impetus for the maintenance of a liberalism that aims to grant women greater equality of opportunity within the present white supremacist capitalistic, patriarchal state". Hooks' unbridled reproach of the west's inherent patriarchal, capitalist, racist, classist, and feminist agenda, as well as her tenacious advocacy for tical "activism," has led the canonization of her work in today's feminist circles, and has procured for her scores of adulation.

However, in her latest work, all about love: New Visions, a more subdued Bell Hooks seems to emerge. No longer are we subjected to a harangue of vehement cries for activism, revolution, and change. Instead, Hooks presents her routine call to action and political analysis through a cajoling but disturbing melange of childhood memories and bad sexual relationships. One stumbles through this almost self-help-styled book with the expectation that eventually, somewhere in the 239 pages, a presentation of Hooks' proclaimed "radical new way to think about the art of loving" will appear. It never happens. New Visions is just a subtle return to the same canard Hooks has advocated for years. Even more, this demeaning and uncreative exposition on the nature of love offers nothing on the topic that has not already been advanced by pop psychologists and pop rock stars for decades. The only way to differentiate Hooks' new book on love and the thousands of love theories that have preceded her is her denouncement of love as it appears in this culture. For Hooks, the millenial and evermore capitalistic West lacks "real" love and is void of a transformative and correct conception of it. The notion of love, which she believes the majority of people ubiquitously embrace, is turning the paradise of the West into a rotting Eden. She attempts to provide a new vision.

Bell Hooks calls for a return to love, a love which she believes this nation has vigorously and intensely turned away from. Yet her point is more serious than a pining for a love that seems absent in the world around her. She argues that the foundation of the west is grounded in an ideology of capitalism and individualism which is incapable of producing an expression of "real" love or even supporting what she calls "a love ethic". Hence, it is not that society has simply embraced an incorrect conception of love, but that society itself is incorrect.

For Bell Hooks, love is the foundation of any functional life force; a society, a community, even a self, cannot exist or progress without feeling, giving, and receiving real love.

"She argues that the foundation of the west is grounded in an ideology of capitalism and individualism which is incapable of producing an expression of "real" love or even supporting what she calls "a love ethic. The notion of love, which she believes the majority of people ubiquitously embrace, is turning the paradise of the West into a rotting Eden."

It is her quest, therefore, to articulate a theory on love that has the capability of transforming the oppressive structure of the West. Concurrently, she believes that if people recognize the pernicious effects capitalism, individualism, and patriarchy have on society and persons, they will mature into this real and transformative love (her understanding of love). This is just a minor example of the mishmash of incoherent causative relationships and speculative claims about love's essence that plague the body of Hooks' writing. However, she does maintain a consistent and unfalsifiable answer to this sort of objection, namely, that "there is a basic interdependency to life." She argues that questions concerning causation are hierarchical in nature, and so do not effect the unstratified and hence unoppressive love she advocates. Moreover, she claims, "the basic interdependency of life is ignored so that separateness and individual gain can be deified". Therefore, any refutation of her claims is considered as a representation of how the west's oppressive ideology has embedded itself in our minds and hearts. Or, in other words, our culture has left us incapable of understanding the interdependency of life and its role as a fundamental element in love, so that its oppressors can maintain a system of domination and subordination. Incidentally, Bell Hooks never considers the obvious notion that love is, essentially, a hierarchical emotion. Love is the most profound subjective emotion people have and they reserve it only for those persons and things that are of great value to them. This valuation process is necessarily a hierarchical ordering; some persons and things get placed lower on the totem pole of our desires and passions because they are not worthy of the intensity of an emotion such as love.

"Talking about the impact of patriarchy and the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the way of love" and understanding that "the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible" is, for Bell Hooks, a new and radical way to approach love. She believes that looking at love through the lens of political analysis presents a rigorous philosophical depiction of love that has been ignored. But really, conspiracy theories and the content of an inured woman's diary is what lies at the heart of this book. Astigmatism is the only interesting element of her new visions, which are otherwise unimaginative and dogmatic.

For example, Bell Hooks denounces pop culture for its use of imagery and medium that relay quixotic, sexually loaded, and fantastical depictions of love. Quixotic images encourage people to avoid thinking about the lovelessness that permeates western society and therefore discourage political action. Hooks argues that this lethargy surrounding political action is perpetuated so that an oppressive system can remain intact. Sexually loaded images associated with love present a "false" conception of love as having dominating, subordinating, and abusive elements. Fantastical depictions of love maintain a cycle of self-hate within people by assuring them that they will never be "good enough". For Hooks, self-hate thwarts love's productive use of transforming individuals and society.

The book moves us through the fears of intimacy that have plagued Hooks since her childhood. Her recollections of that "first abandonment, that first banishment from love's paradise" provides her with the opportunity to chastise the traditional household and the sexual roles that women and men haven taken up freely for centuries. She argues that childhoods experienced in the west are childhoods of lovelessness. Traditionally structured households comprised of a husband and wife who have authority over their children are a miniature societies complete with unprecedented hierarchy, patriarchy, and oppression. For Hooks, it is in childhood that persons learn a conception of love that will dictate their understanding of the emotion for the rest of their lives. The nuclear family and traditional sex roles that dominate family life in the West teach children that love can coexist with abuse, and that love is necessitated by a system of domination, authority, and power. If this is the perception of love given and received by the sons and daughters of our nation then it is no wonder we are a nation which is void of real love, but full of a "constant state of yearning" for love. No more beneficial is the media's depiction of love, which informs the child that love is beauty, material prosperity, and abuse.

"However, her argument against traditional parenting cannot be viewed merely as a disenchantment with private property, she also succeeds in laying groundwork for the necessary abolition of the individual."

The childhood love dilemma can be solved if we revisualize the household unit: she wants to abolish private families and dual-person parenting for community and group-raised children. This is a blatant attack on the minuscule bit of privacy that government has left us with--our private families and our roots. And, like a good statist feminist, Hooks wants to eliminate even that. However, her argument against traditional parenting cannot be viewed merely as a disenchantment with private property, she also succeeds in laying groundwork for the necessary abolition of the individual. By disowning "our families of origin" for their individualist and atomistic identities, and raising our children under paternalistic communities of parents, friends, policy makers, and the government, individuals would become extinct.

Despite the self-help style to Hooks' exposition on love, the book is not even successful as a self-help guide. The purpose of pop psychology books, like Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus, is to offer the reader advice on ways to improve their lot in life, to increase their sense of self-worth, and to offer explanations for behavior that the everyday person cannot understand. Most of these books are useless and offer arbitrary speculations, dated psycho-analytic babble, and political agendas of their own, but at least they are honest about their mission to convert. Bell Hooks, on the other hand, cannot even claim much. She flaunts concern with the state of the individual and the way in which a lack of love can ruin a person's life. But, her consolation is phony and self-improvement is the last thing on her agenda. Instead of offering a reader ways in which to improve their lot in life, she argues that improving one's lot (and the desire to do so) is competitive individualism that leads to abuse, cynicism, and oppression. Her advice: forget about yourself, think about the community lot. Rather than increasing her reader's sense of self-worth and providing her with hope for love's transformative existence in her life, Hooks demolishes the self, claiming that our families of origin need to be abandoned for alternative and interdependent units of love, that communal love is what transforms-- not individual love. Her advice: there is no self; there is only us.

For Hooks, all the consequences of the west's degrading love and capitalistic individualism will be ameliorated if freedom of association is abolished. Hooks argues that no one should be denied love and respect from another person; no one should be denied resources that they do not have; no one should be left without. "We can celebrate and honor communalism by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love." Therefore, Hooks even prescribes measures to limit the things and people we freely choose to smother in excessive love. Just as the delimiting of the constitutional right for freedom of association is unreasonable, so is Hooks' prescription for love. Her solution will only push the earthly paradise of the west into aesthetic and economic deterioration. Bell Hooks should heed the advice of one of the best writers to emerge from the capitalistic west:

"Love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges,
hath his seat in reason,
and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heavenly love thou mayest ascend."

--John Milton, Paradise Lost.