Love, Technology, and Dating

The 1990s saw the birth of a new trend: speed dating. Conceived by a California rabbi to help Jewish singles to meet and marry, the trend suggests that modern life moves fast, and that people no longer have the time to go through the codex of old-school courtship. Speed dating supersedes this codex by having its participants rotate on shorter dates, tête-à-tête, which last from three to eight minutes. After a complete rotation the organizer compiles a list of preferences, and ensures that those who match go on to exchange contact information. The result is just as brutal as its more languorous counterpart (am I really that unattractive?), yet true to the Zeitgeist of a life in company with high speed technology. Science confirms that this is how love works. According to a recent study, we generate lasting impressions of a potential love mate within the first three seconds of meeting him or her.¹ If the first impressions stick, then why go through the trouble of outdated practices such as serenades, letters, messengers, and prolonged anxiety?

In his new book, Love and Other Technologies, cultural theorist Dominic Pettman does not address speed dating but instead dives into the issues that make it so emblematic of our time. In so doing, he aims at “retrofitting” love; that is, developing a “de-subjectivized, de-psychologized concept of love” understood as a “pure potentiality whose seductive power and rhetorical purpose would be diminished through the usual clumsy attempts at actualization” (30, 33). The concept serves two purposes: (1) it permits an analysis of love that discloses its traumas, paradoxes, and attractions, and (2) it cultivates a communal mode of attachment and belonging based on difference and singularity rather than identity and generality. Both purposes ask us to entertain questions such as: How does love define relationships in an age of not only speed dating but also pornography, gossip, and fashion? Might another love exceed the totalizing movement of post-industrial economy (read: capitalism)? If so, what would make this love possible, and what would be the implications for issues of politics and ethics?

Trafficking equally well in pop culture, in post-structuralist theory, and in avant-gardist literature, Pettman approaches these questions by way of a move as obvious as it is elegant. Love, he argues, does not signify the counter-pole of technology. Rather, in the same way that life is a techne, formed and expressed through communication and other tools, love comes about in conjunction with the hand-shakes, kisses, facial expressions, and libidinal economies that underpin romantic discourse. This argument owes much to the work of Bernard Stiegler, who shows how technology broadly conceived forms our understanding of humanity (17–19). Pettman uses this insight to de-romanticize love, and to liberate it from the nostalgia of a lost paradise, one that not even the fusion of two into one can recuperate: “when we speak of love, we are not discussing merely the primordial encounter between humans, which is only later coded through culture, but rather the inherent instrumentality which accompanies the emergence of the being that loves (or seeks love)” (24; emphasis in original).

The originality of Love and Other Technologies might be how it couples the move to technology with a second move -- one from thinking of love in a mode of fulfillment and interiority to one of trauma and exteriority. Here the works of Agamben, Deleuze, Nancy, and Zizek figure prominently. (I shall later return to whether this line-up needs further differentiation.) Working with and against these thinkers, Pettman discloses a love scene in which the two lovers never become fully transparent to each other. This nontransparency might be the very “essence” of love (136). For example, when a lover asks “why me and not an-other?” the partner, if honest, can only answer “because you are one of them.” Pettman explains this case through an extended engagement with literary...