[iDC] Love and Other Technologies

[Dominic Pettman]

Hello IDC people.

My new friend and colleague, Trebor, has been kind enough to invite me 
to contribute to the list, by way of introducing my most recent book 
/Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age/ 
(Fordham University Press, 2006). I would like to thank him for this 
opportunity to further spread the word about a project which is, let’s 
say, in the “slow-burn” post-publication stage. So let me begin with a 
shameless plug, via my other friend and colleague, McKenzie Wark, who 
was good enough to describe it as “the ultimate book on love for the 
over-educated.”

To begin with, this book represents an interdisciplinary study of the 
way in which three key terms – /love/, /technology/ and /community/ – 
are currently being figured by various aspects of contemporary media and 
culture. My fundamental argument is that these terms are in fact words 
/which designate the same cultural movement/: a movement /towards/ the 
Other, which continually redefines what it means to be human (especially 
a human amongst other humans; or, indeed, posthumans).

I turn to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben for guidance, since I am 
intrigued by the possibilities inherent in his concept of “whatever 
being” – the rather abstract citizens of his “coming community” – 
especially tricksters, fakes, ‘toons, assistants, and even porn stars. 
My book looks to such figures within new media, cinema, and literature, 
in order to further “flesh out” this notion.

One of the motivations behind writing this book began with the seemingly 
simple question: what does Agamben mean when he talks about “whatever 
being”? As is usually the case with seemingly simple questions, they 
lead to other questions, which themselves spiral out into a network of 
inter-related, and ultimately more complex, questions. For instance, how 
does this notion of “whatever being” relate to his concept of the coming 
community? What would an “inessential commonality” (the basis of such a 
community) actually look like? Is the “automatism of love” (Zizek) a 
stumbling-block to thinking the coming community? Or is there a way to 
reinflect the lover’s discourse beyond notions of subjective essence? 
(In other words, if we are all men and women “without qualities,” on 
what basis do we select one partner over another?) And how do 
contemporary forces – such as the Internet, globalization, and the 
information revolution – encourage or discourage an emergent conception 
of community . . . ideally outside the increasingly exhausted 
co-ordinates of humanism, the humanities, nihilism, postmodernism and 
psychoanalysis (to name only a few)?

For while we often ponder the meaning behind the ur-sentence “I love 
you,” we have concentrated most of our efforts on the word “love,” 
rather than questioning the “I” and the “you” – as if the bridge were 
more important than the banks it claims to connect. Indeed, we tend to 
assume that this metaphor of bridging two stable and identifiable 
entities is enough to capture the passionate event; which it clearly is 
not. Love is more than merely an engineering feat which joins to 
previously isolated points. It is a bringing-forth, a revelation – a 
/techne/. (After all, we /make/ love, don’t we?)

Hence my primal scene, featuring the famous androgynes in Plato’s 
/Symposium/, who have been split in two by the angry gods, and who thus 
seek their “other half” in frenzied desparation. In order to fuse back 
together again, these love-crazed creatures are obliged to rely on 
“Hephaestes and his instruments.” Love is thus, from the outset, a 
technical operation. (I don’t actually say this in the book, but will do 
so in a forthcoming article, that Heidegger’s definition of modern 
technology as “an unreasonable demand of nature,” works beautifully as a 
definition of love as well.)

Which is all to say, that whether we follow the argument of someone as 
spectacularly anti-romantic as Niklas Luhmann, who describes love as 
“the codification of intimacy,” or the melancholic structuralism of 
Roland Barthes and his “image-repertoire,” we gather the instruments 
which can help us form a deeper appreciation of the mysterious 
relationship between /longing/ and /be/-longing.

A brief glimpse at my index of proper names will reveal directors such 
as Wong Kar-Wai, Terence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Hirokazu Koreeda, and 
Shu Lea Cheang, as well as writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, J.G. 
Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Musil, and Haruki Murakami. These 
figures are supplemented by the conceptual maps of thinkers such as 
Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kaja Silverman, Søren Kierkegaard, 
Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, Sylvia Agacinski, and many many 
others.

So I’ll leave you with a brief extract (pasted below), which will 
hopefully function as an exciting trailer for the whole thing.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them to the list.

Further writing samples from this book, and my previous titles /After 
the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion/ (SUNY, 2002) and /Avoiding 
the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object/ (Amsterdam UP, 2004), can be 
found here:

http://www.blackjelly.com/pettman

Thanks for listening.

dominic
pettmand at newschool.edu <mailto:pettmand at newschool.edu>

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*Here’s Looking At You Kid*

“Separate the sexual act from love, and the language of love is 
devalued.” So states Anthony Burgess. In the very next sentence, he goes 
on to say: “An aspect of our freedom is our right to debase the language 
totally, so that its syntagms become mere noise.” The link between the 
first and the second sentence is left intriguingly open, inviting us to 
fill in the blanks with our own thoughts on the relationship between 
eros, agape, communication and structure. (And not only that, but to 
reflect on the notion of “relationship” itself.)
Identifying the signal-to-noise relationship of amorous discourse seems 
like a technical imperative in these troubled times. While at first 
glance, a study of love may seem like a retreat into the personal, it 
will soon become apparent that it is anything but. Love, like weaponized 
anthrax spores, has a habit of getting into everything.
One entry-point we can use for such an all-encompassing and diffuse 
discourse is the visual mechanism which often triggers its existence in 
the first place. As Kaja Silverman maintains, “passion is a semiotic 
affair” (50). Indeed, this same critic identifies a formal 
transhistorical human subject, the “world spectator,” who is referred to 
as such since they (we) are /subject/ to the scopic regime of love: “The 
world spectator is emphatically a desiring subject” (11). Describing a 
conceptual trajectory linking Plato’s hypnotized cave-dwellers with 
Debord’s equally mesmerized cinema-goers, Silverman focuses on the 
ontological feedback loops of (visual) attraction:

[W]ere others to look at us through our own eyes, ‘ourselves’ is 
precisely what we would never be. We can appear, and so Be, only if 
others ‘light’ us up. To be lit up means to be seen from a vantage point 
from which we can never see ourselves. It also means to embody not our 
own, but /someone else’s/ idea of beauty. Our ‘essence’ is thus 
strangely nonessential. (19)

And further:

The being whom I light up with the radiance of affirmation supplies me 
with the form which allows me to see what I could not otherwise see; it 
alone makes possible beauty’s embodiment. It is together, then, that we 
bring about its appearance. (20-21)

If Beauty goes for a walk alone in the forest, would Beauty still be 
beautiful? The answer is an emphatic no.
Thus, for Silverman – as for myself – “libidinal signification has an 
/ontological/ force” (43). That is to say, every relationship is a 
transductive relationship (i.e., a relationship which doesn’t merely 
link, but /creates/ the terms in that same relationship). Beauty – or 
more simply Self, whether figured as beautiful or ugly or somewhere 
in-between – does not precede the encounter with Others. This 
“ontological force” is the one emphasized throughout the following 
chapters, and prompts an ethical assessment of one’s own actions. Not so 
much in the moralistic-behavioral sense (“am I a good person?”), but 
according to a more symbolic economy of recognition and deferral (“am I 
a person?”). Silverman states, “To each of us, through our particular 
libidinal history, has been given the potentiality for participating in 
a unique series of disclosures. This potentiality is not so much a 
talent as a responsibility. When we fail to realize it, we are 
bottomlessly guilty” (48).
Without embracing this statement completely (in what sense is this 
series /unique/? and why give so much ground to the deployment of guilt? 
do we detect a whiff of emotional blackmail here?), the notion of 
responsibility in relation to an erotics of Being is nevertheless a 
revealing one. Through it we can /see/ the stakes involved in being 
together, longing together, and belonging together (in the sense of W. 
J. T. Mitchell’s desire to “make seeing show itself” [175]).
For in English at least, the verb “to look” can be both objective (“you 
look good”), and subjective (“I look at you”). It is simultaneously 
passive and active, gazing and gazed-upon. And yet, from the myth of 
Aphrodite’s lazy eye, to those infamous blinkers which fall over the 
retinas of the impassioned, love is an interactive event which involves 
not only sight, but all of the senses . . . and perhaps others we are 
not even aware of . . . yet.
To coin a phrase, then: If love is blind, sex is Braille.