Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age

Introduction

Introduction Ontology does not occur at a level reserved for principles, a level that is withdrawn , speculative, and altogether abstract. Its name means ‘‘the thinking of existence .’’ And today the situation of ontology signifies the following: to think existence at the height of this challenge to thinking that is globalness as such (which is designated as ‘‘capital,’’ ‘‘(de-) Westernization,’’ ‘‘technology,’’ ‘‘rupture of history,’’ and so forth). — j e a n - l u c n a n c y , Being Singular Plural The unthinkable is not something we are thinking about at the moment. — p e t e r k e n y o n , chief executive of Manchester United Football Club In the Fine Underwear of Our Minds There is a scene in Tom Tykwer’s rather pedestrian film Run Lola Run (1998)1 when the two protagonists—Lola (Franka Potente) and her boyfriend , Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu)—lie in bed discussing the random nature of love and existence. Lola asks Manni that age-old question which lovers often pose their partners: ‘‘Why me? Of all the people in the world, why did you pick me?’’ As we know, one of the main functions of romantic narrative is to weave all the strands of coincidence and contingency together in such a way that the lovers feel compelled to believe in the benign intervention of an invisible hand of fate. ‘‘It could not have been otherwise,’’ they tell each other. (If it could have been otherwise, then this counterfactual eventuality would have erased the first possibility, thereby permanently sealing the other road not taken.) ‘‘Why me,’’ asks Lola, ‘‘and not one of those other girls?’’ Her boyfriend responds as the ancient script demands, reassuring Lola of those unique 1 2 Love and Other Technologies qualities that ensure her status as the loved one: the individual who stands out amongst other individuals. Imagine, however, that we were to indulge in some retrospective script doctoring, delicately rewriting this scene according to a less-established romantic formula. In such a case, Manni’s answer could have been ‘‘But Lola, you are one of those other girls.’’2 Such a subtle shift in perspective may seem trivial, pedantic, and even a little cruel in the context of ego reassurance. Nevertheless, emerging conceptual models of ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ are forcing us to rethink the relationship between self and other, subject and object, individual and community in ways which are anything but trivial. How the subject negotiates the highly fluid character of contemporary society and orients him- or herself within the schizo-semiotic flux of the twenty-first century have become questions of pressing concern to those with an interest in deconstructing the relatively stable (and staple) Freudian-Enlightenment unit of ego-based individuality. The seeds of this emerging perspective have recently been harvested by the philosophical investigations of community by Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy, although they were sown several decades earlier in the sprawling literary fields of Marcel Proust and Robert Musil. As is the way with agricultural metaphors, such seeds can be traced back to the earliest articulations of art and philosophy. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s narrator, Marcel, travels to the seaside town of Balbec, where he is confronted by a gestalt gaggle of young women walking along the sand: Although each was of a type absolutely different from the others, they all had beauty; but to tell the truth I had seen them for so short a time, and without venturing to look hard at them, that I had not yet individualised any of them . . . and when (according to the order in which the group met the eye, marvellous because the most different aspects were combined in it, but confused as a piece of music in which I was unable to isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten) I saw a pallid oval, black eyes, green eyes emerge, I did not know if these were the same that had already charmed me a moment ago, I could not relate them to any one girl whom I had set apart from the rest and identified. And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I should presently establish between them permeated the group with a sort of shimmering harmony, the continuous transmutation of a fluid, collective and mobile beauty. (1989, 847–48) This ‘‘pale madrepore’’ constitutes an ‘‘invisible but harmonious bond, like a single warm...