Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age

by Dominic Pettman

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it can - although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the human in the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the techtonic movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of Eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire - love, in other words - always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a self among others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage - the stirrings of the soul-have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues, is not eternal, but external.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Dominic Pettman currently lives, works, learns and teaches in New York City. He is particularly interested in the ways in which "technology" influences our self-perceptions and cultural conversations.

Reviews

[Plainview · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is possibly the richest, most provocative essay I have ever read. Its insights into the relationship between love, technology and community illuminate so much meaning that is relevant to so many different subjects that it questions and destroys the artificial barriers that people put between disciplines. This "diagonal thinking" is at the heart of the book, and it opens the door for Pettman to use several outlooks in developing his theories, which breed more questions then they could possibly answer, and yet give an overarching viewpoint that is exceptionally fulfilling.

[Heidi]

jason, finish the damn book already...

[CL Chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could be better organized, but the book has introduced a really good ensemble of thinkers.