Juliet's Economy

In the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Juliet confesses to the dark night her love for the man she’s just met. Little does she know, Romeo is there in the bushes, gazing up at her with heart also blazing. In the scene that follows, the surprised Juliet elaborates a theory of love that has been interpreted for centuries as naïve and idealistic. What happens if we take seriously the model of love articulated by this young girl from Verona? What if love is an economy that operates not on scarcity but on abundance?

Blame teenage insecurity, blame the patriarchy, blame his aching heart still reeling from Rosaline’s refusal, in any case, Romeo’s model of love is grounded in a traditional economy of exchange. He wants to receive and give in equal measure, at an agreed-upon time. Love is trade, and the trade must be fair.

When Juliet tries to leave, saying that this is all happening too fast, Romeo stops her, saying like so many men before and after him: “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”

“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” asks Juliet

“The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” he says.

She laughs at his pedantry: “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it!”

Juliet needed no guarantees before she confessed her love. She required no certainty of exchange. She gave because there was nothing else to do with her overflowing love but give it – to the night sky, to the vision of Romeo she held in her heart, to whoever was listening in the garden.

“And yet I would it were to give again.” She continues.

This worries Romeo: “Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?”

“But to be frank, and give it thee again.” Juliet knows that it isn’t the having or the getting of love that is the most pleasurable, but the giving of it. She wants to give, and give again; reaping repeatedly the pleasure of the gift.

She laughs again (at least in the production in my head): “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.”

There is nothing stopping her from giving her love endlessly. She need not await exchange. She need not play coy with her devotion until she’s received certainty that he will give his back.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”

In Juliet’s economy, there is no scarcity. Giving love only generates more.

Alternative Economics

In Vajrayana Buddhism, there's a preliminary practice sometimes prescribed to those of us who need help developing generosity. You hold in one hand a gemstone, a gold coin, or, nowadays, perhaps some small and surprisingly valuable piece of technological equipment like an iPhone. Slowly and simply, you pass it from your right hand to your left, then back again. You give. You receive. You give again.

In addition to rehearsing the baby steps of generosity, this practice is also a beginner’s guide to letting go. It’s the kind of letting go that doesn’t end in utter loss, disappearance, or death. It’s peek-a-boo light. It’s Freud’s fort-da game where the spool never rolls too far away.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the psychoanalytic description of subject-formation. How we become the selves we feel ourselves to be. According to Freud, "the ego is the precipitate of the abandoned object cathexis,"(On Narcissism). In other words, who we are is a collage crafted from our emotional attachments to people we've loved and lost. It's my policy to take Freud with a grain of salt, but this description rings true. On quiet days I can feel the people I've loved moving around inside my psyche, or at least the familiar rumblings of their memories.

But the loss part is hard to stomach. Must we lose people we love to build our own individual subjectivities? I'm lucky enough to still have vibrant, loving, living parents and ongoing, caring relationships with many of my previous partners. I know that nothing lasts forever, but I here I am, enriched by their existence. Haven't these people nested themselves into the muddled montage of my self-image without being completely abandoned or lost?

I don't think the economy of the heart burns the same fuel as the economic engine of late capitalism. I don't think gain and loss need be tied together in such mechanistic union. I believe there is a way to lose without catastrophic trauma and other foundations to build upon than the corpses of those lost.

To me, performance seems like a version of this Buddhist practice of giving from one hand to the other. The communication -- even communion -- possible in the performance event challenges the gain/loss model of giving and receiving. Transformation rather than exchange can take place between subjects. If the energy of this could be harnessed, we might find that perpetual motion machine dreamed about by theoretical physicists. I imagine the heart and psyche pay as little heed to the laws of thermodynamics as they do to systems of economic modeling.