Experimental love, or "love as the sum total of deviations from its modern principles"

Journal title SOCIOLOGIA E POLITICHE SOCIALI
Author/s Riccardo Prandini
Publishing Year 2020 Issue 2019/3
Language English Pages 30 P. 25-54 File size 321 KB
DOI 10.3280/SP2019-003002
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Love is still a powerful "cultural imperative", in cases where society still wants to furnish symbols for "personalising" communication. There is a huge need for a cultivated semantics and for the capacity to learn. But, as once Luhmann said the points of orientation for the codification of love as a symbolic medium have shifted so radically that one can hardly tell whether and which topics of the semantics of love can be adopted and further employed. Is it really possible that semantic of love cannot condense shared and communicable meanings anymore? The glaring contradiction between a love that has been deflated and a love which is growingly requested as a symbol, calls for more radical thinking. Maybe the concept of "culture" where we are looking for answers is unsuitable: too coherent, recorded in a modern, excessively structured, stable encyclopaedia. Maybe we would be better advised to search, in a constantly open flux of communications, for the proliferation of micro-semantics and subcultures of love that are being updated all the time

Keywords: Semantic; Love; Intimacy; Culture; Social Morphogenesis

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Riccardo Prandini, Experimental love, or "love as the sum total of deviations from its modern principles" in "SOCIOLOGIA E POLITICHE SOCIALI" 3/2019, pp 25-54, DOI: 10.3280/SP2019-003002