i would like an essay with the given instructions using the two articles below. i need it by thursday the 6th

In “Love and Other Technologies” you define love as an essentially technological phenomenon. How have amorous structures developed or changed in today’s techno-cultures, to create new ‘technologies of feelings’?

DP: The temptation is to think of love as an intrinsically organic oc- casion, which only then becomes complicated or supplemented by technology. But if we go back to the primal scene of Western thinking on love, Plato’s Symposium, we learn that all sorts of ‘instruments’ are required to fuse lovers back with their (literal) other half. Beyond my- thology, we always encounter the beloved in their human technicity: the architectural mise-en-scène, clothing, cosmetics, cooking, language, techniques of the body, and so on. Humans are saturated by technics, and love is essentially a matter of communication media. Above all, love clamors to be expressed and communicated. And it needs technol- ogy to do so; whether this is poetry, texting, or Tantra. On a different level, love could be considered an exemplary case of ‘techne.’ That is, an art or artifice which brings something new into the world; something deliberately fashioned. Modern love might thus be akin to modern tech- nology, in Heidegger’s account; that is to say, “unreasonable demand” of nature (1982).

However, if we start with Luhmann’s definition of love as “the codifi- cation of intimacy” (2014), then we can envisage various versions of the code, not unlike successive releases of digital operating systems. As with computers, no code is born ex nihilo, or reinvented one hundred percent anew. Each version is designed to be ‘backwards compatible,’ so that it can function without too many issues. And so, we have the same buggy palimpsests in the contemporary codification of intimacy, never able to make a quantum leap from previous ideological eras. Indeed we feel these contradictory cohabitations very intimately as lovers. For instance, at one moment we are obliged to be chivalrous or courtly, and the next we are in the grip of modern love, or free love, or cynical postmodern love. No wonder we sometimes freeze up or crash!

1 Love Materialism Technologies of Feeling in the ‘Post-Material’ World (An Interview)

Dominic Pettman

14 Dominic Pettman

But your wider question is vast, of course, and should really be an- swered with close and ethnographic attention to local context and spe- cific subjectivities. In other words, it’s difficult to generalize in a useful way. But we can offer some tentative hypotheses, while admitting that we are in the midst of a massive transitional moment; and can only spec- ulate within the digital maelstrom, without the benefit of historical per- spective as yet.

Firstly, love has become hyper-mediated. In one sense this is nothing new. For millennia, lovers have communicated through surreptitious media, across physical and social distances. (Witness Ovid, encouraging people to erase their tablets, lest their affairs be uncovered; still good ad- vice for the iPad generation.) But the instantaneity of communication— its relentless 24/7 real-time aspect—has changed the game. This can make relationships more fragile, since according to Luhmann, the great enemy of love is explicit communication. Love is supposed to be sim- ply understood, elliptically or implicitly, through the subtle manipula- tion of signs. But new media technologies can also make relationships more enduring, since even the estranged person is just a tap or a click away. Relationships that would have evaporated in earlier centuries now haunt us, with the im/possibility of relapse, thanks to the persistence of networks and connections. So on the one hand, love is seen to be more Teflon-coated, as people slip from one partner to another. But on the other hand, there is a new kind of digital traction—or even perverse fidelity—which social media especially allows. Breakups may seem eas- ier now, since we don’t necessarily even need to do them face to face. But they are also harder, since we can stalk or be stalked; or simply be reminded.

Secondly, our amorous conversations happen in a very generic and distributed way, placing emphasis on the exchange—as much, if not more than—the identity of the beloved. (This is why people can now fall in love with avatars or AI’s.) There is an emphasis on communication for its own sake (cf. Jodi Dean’s notion of “communicative capitalism”, 2009). We are encouraged to share stories, voice opinions, or narrate experiences, rather than merely inhabit them; to simply be with. One side effect is that the phone itself can become an erotic object requiring sensual stroking: its sleek materiality standing in for the missing, de- sired one. Likewise, the anonymous ‘ping’ of message notification can suddenly stand in for the voice of the infatuation, to a Pavlovian effect.

Furthermore, this compulsive and incessant communication occurs almost exclusively within the architectures, vectors, and protocols pro- vided by Silicon Valley and its financial affiliates. This further compli- cates the relationship between personal feelings and public expression (which is in fact pre-privatized). If you share or upload an image declar- ing your love to another on Facebook, or simply type those three words into Snapchat, your budding relationship is being logged and monetized.

Love Materialism 15

While this may feel remote and peripheral to the intensity of your ex- perience, Facebook, Google, and others are making detailed portraits of you, including and especially your desires. This in turn will have a strong influence on what you do with these desires in the future, any of which could have decisive consequences. (For instance, a tailored ad to visit Italy or go to graduate school might persuade you to buy a ticket or enroll in a class, and then transform your life completely.)

Thirdly, our new technologies—especially dating apps—provide a vertiginous sense of infinite possibility, which the banality of daily life cannot provide. (As Adorno says of our consumerist system, we are obliged to be satisfied with the menu, and never the meal itself; cf.Horkerheimer and Adorno 2002). The swiping instinct extends the ‘next’ ethic of channel-surfing to people, rather than just television shows. Badiou (2012) and Žižek (2015) lament this new state of af- fairs, in which one’s partner is provided by an algorithm, rather than an event such as those so often depicted in romantic movies. The coup de foudre! Millennials will insist, however, that you still have to meet the actual person that the machine has served up for you, and as a consequence there is still a great deal of room for eventful magic during the initial interpersonal encounters. (Badiou argues that love is taking contingency and turning it into a destiny-for-two. There is no reason that this can’t apply to a couple who first found each other online.) An unfortunate byproduct of all this is that we are reminded of our replaceability; which introduces a top-note of suspicion or paranoia into our lives (“Who is she/he tapping away to, when I’m already right here?!”).

Fourthly, love is obliged to share a media ecosystem in which pornog- raphy prevails. Desire is at once reduced to overdetermined represen- tations of ‘animalistic’ rutting, and complicated into the million kinks and erotic niches available on the X-rated web. Flusser (2014) writes eloquently on the need to avoid the two dangers of prudishness and sen- sationalism when it comes to understanding love in the age of hyper- sexualized consumption. What he calls “the broadband sexualization of our codes” threatens the very fabric or structure of love, since the latter depends on gestures uncolonized by pornography (even as it is impossible to make a firm division between love and sex). We must be vigilant, Flusser argues, against the programming of love by this new, limited “techno imaginary.” (For his part, Baudrillard (1990) notes that pornography essentially says: “There must be good sex somewhere, for I am its caricature.” Sadly, the more we rely on the caricature to give us a glimpse of the elusive actuality, the further we stray from the possibil- ity of experiencing that which it parodies. In any case, sexy selfies are the seductive currency of the young (and not so young). And this form of auto-erotica is already having a decisive influence on contemporary courtship rituals.

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Finally (and more positively), social media is—despite all talk about filter bubbles—exposing people to new ideas, perspectives, and ways of living. Polyamory, for instance, is a growing choice, thanks to the ca- pacity of digital technologies to accelerate awareness of (and perhaps experimentation with) less conventional ways of being in love. Same-sex marriage received its ultimate blessing and political momentum thanks to the Internet, and we will surely see new codifications of intimacy, including a challenging of compulsory monogamy, emerging from the meta-chatter.

In short, given the solicitous power of our smart phones, love seems both closer and further away than it did before the global girdling of the Internet. Intimacy appears to be ‘on tap’, since there will (hopefully) always be someone to send you a heart emoji when you need one. The flipside is that this may be all the other person is willing to commit to. We are always available unless we deliberately become emotionally unavailable (also known as ghosting).

How do new media influence love or intimacy? Is ‘technology- mediated love’ the new mode of executing affection?

DP: I see what you are doing there! You are giving me another chance to re- spond to similar themes! (Most appreciated.) Well, as I have said elsewhere, perhaps too often: “If love is blind, then sex is Braille”. There is seriousness within the quip here. Love has always been a matter of negotiating the interface: of language, of signs, of bodies, of expectations, and so on. We must often literally feel our way into, or at least around, the ‘Other’.

How do we prove love? Through gestures. Through the somatic mate- rialization of desire, which involves a whole panoply of props and pros- theses (not to mention conventions, discourses, assumptions, etc.). New media will bring with them new gestures designed to convey age-old affects. (For instance, putting down the phone when the beloved ar- rives!) We are only at the infancy of wearable tech, and one hopes that tomorrow’s fashion designers will give us all sorts of elaborate and beau- tiful ways to signal—or camouflage—our affective states. To reiterate a little, however, love has always been technologically mediated; if by love we mean the cultural scaffolding which builds itself around desire. All animals experience attraction or desire. But it is we humans who ren- der these into legible, repeatable signs and symbols. As Nietzsche said, humans are the animal that promise to make promises (2012). And this rather painful process comes with a coterie of tools and mnemotechnics (for instance, the wedding ring). The difference between today and, say, the 18th century or ancient Greece, is that the virtual element of love— the imaginative space in which desire is first nurtured and transformed into a socially recognizable situation—is happening within and through digital, networked tools. We might go so far as to create a historical

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taxonomy of different types of love, configured by the dominant me- dium of the time (theater, song, sermon, novel, film, tweet, etc.).

My hunch is that younger people today depend on their phones to do the work of virtual romantic labor that novels used to do for, say, Emma Bovary (or at least readers of Madame Bovary). The uncanny thing about the beloved person is that their actual presence is often too much for one’s love to bear or cope with. As Elizabeth Bowen (1938) once wrote, referring to the first flush of love: “[…] the spirit stays so tuned up that the beloved’s real presence could be too much, unbearable: one wants to say to him: ‘Go, that you may be here’.” Phones and laptops allow the frisson of the erotic fort/da game of existential peekaboo to play through. However, when the rendezvous finally occurs, the lovers are perhaps left to improvise the awk- wardness of a face to face encounter. Surely it’s only a matter of time before someone makes and markets tangible real-world emojis, to pass from person to person, when forced to interact in so-called real life. My other hunch— and I’m not a digital native, so am gleaning this from conversations with my students—is that apps and sites allow love to be navigated more efficiently. Given the stresses upon the average millennial—precarious wage-slavery, crushing student debt, and so on—love begins to look like an anachronistic luxury enjoyed by previous generations; yet another victim of the seemingly interminable global financial crisis. It is easy for aging theorists to opine against the “liquid love” of postmodern times, or the “uberfication of the heart”, as we might call it today (Bauman 2003). But the heart is nothing if not pragmatic. And it will find ways to get what it seeks, in the scant time currently allowed between freelance jobs or internships.

How do new theoretical findings in the humanities change our perception of love?

This is a very interesting question, and again deserves far more space than we can dedicate to it in just an interview format. But I suppose the most obvious places to begin are people actively working on love as a theme or object. Srećko Horvat and Byung-Chul Han are cutting- edge European theorists who picked up the torch left by someone like Erich Fromm; arguing that love is under assault by the ever-evolving technologies of narcissism, and that it is necessary to invent “a new form of love” (Horvat 2015). In doing so, they ironically echo the rhetoric deployed on behalf of the same forces they are writing against; the dis- ruption discourse of Silicon Valley, which places more value on innova- tion than preservation. These thinkers are strong on critique, but short on details or suggestions; and we impatiently await the Fourier of the 21st century. Bernard Stiegler, in all of his two dozen books or more, has (albeit with more depth and rigor) likewise warned against the dan- gers of our current new media arrangements, and the habits they instill. But he somehow balances his dystopian diagnosis with utopian hope

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and projects. I am fascinated by his suggestion that we are in danger of reaching what I rephrased as “peak libido” (Pettman 2011), and are thus running perilously short of the natural human resource of interpersonal attention and investment. Stiegler understands “primordial narcissism” as something we need to recultivate in order to properly care for the self, as well as the ‘Other’ (Stiegler 2015). Perhaps we need a ‘slow love’ moment to catch on, as the slow food movement did in Italy, and then the rest of the world. (Although this comes with its own complications, especially in terms of economic opportunities, temporal privilege, and so on. After all, it’s difficult to cook or love slowly if you are working three jobs and trying to feed a family.)

Lauren Berlant continues to be one of our best theorists of love, and the “cruel optimism” that is often crystallized in its name (Berlant 2011). She has done nuanced work on love as an inescapably queer feeling. Lee Edelman is doing interesting negative work on a sub- strand of queer love, in an age which the end of humanity is not just a theological, but also a scientific, possibility (Edelman 2004). Indeed, the most promising work for me, in terms of opening up the lover’s discourse to more generous and generative interpretation, are those which challenge the neo-liberal subjectivity upon which love so often rests. (That is, the idea of a unique ‘I’ in the first place.) Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman in particular have written several books which affirm the more pagan notion of the generic encounter, or analogical refrain, which helps us begin to think about transcending the restric- tive and blinkered narcissism-a-deux which too often goes under the name of love. In less convoluted language, these thinkers help us to recognize the strong impersonal element in the midst of love, which may help us not take the trials and tribulations of our romantic lives so—well—personally!

More panoramically, I still on occasion enjoy watching Team Lacan bickering with Team Deleuze, in terms of whether we should be pri- oritizing a fundamental (alien) lack at the heart of intersubjective in- timacy, or a non-human surplus of desire. The essentially melancholic position of the former has its seductions, but too easily reduces the mul- tiplicity of Eros to a kind of algebraic formula. Likewise, the Deleuzian assemblage—designed to avoid such reductionist thinking—has since been stuck with its own default lenses by many of his followers. There is, of course, a lot of interesting feminist work at present on women’s “affective labor,” as well as revisionist histories (Oksala 2015; Weigel 2016). Also, let’s not forget the kind of ‘cosmo-political’ approaches to ethical modes of being-with charted by people like Stengers, Haraway, and Barad; in which human love is merely one element in an infinite universe of attractions and entanglements.

The thing about working with a rubric like love is that it is so vast as to become ethereal; complicated by different linguistic and cultural

Love Materialism 19

traditions. Is a study of sex work in Thailand about love? No, it’s about labor conditions, economic policies, tourist vectors, patriarchal power structures, legal frameworks, and so on. But also yes, in the sense that people seeking out prostitutes are acting under the sign of Eros, perhaps seeking something beyond the marriage bed, or enacting some fantasy which we can trace back to a specific expression of parental love (or lack of). If we decide to start with the romantic couple, then we are quickly obliged to zoom out, and ask wider sociological and philosophical ques- tions about interpellated identity and intersubjectivity. Conversely, if we start with society then we are also obliged to zoom in to the singular subjects and experiences which create and sustain larger libidinal econ- omies in the first place. To dwell merely in the psychology of the lover is to see only a part of the picture. Likewise, to indulge in a macro survey of the social mechanics of intimacy—with no reference to the activities and motivations of actual people—then we are drinking rather tepid ‘baby-less’ bathwater.

For me, however, the most promising work does not talk about love, but rather deploys itself in the mode of a new Eros. (Or a new appreciation of an old, forgotten Eros.) I’m thinking of experiments in the humanities— or post-humanities—that align themselves with the arts; going beyond a pedantic, professional interdisciplinary to radically rethink what it means to think at all, in an age of hyper specialization and countless instances of ‘the narcissism of minor differences’. The whole debate around post- critique (Latour 2004, Felski 2015) is an opportunity not to take sides in this debate to foster new ways of bridging the humanities with the social sciences, the sciences, the arts, and other social sectors, creative imag- inaries, and political priorities. If the university collapses, as it is truly in danger of doing in the age of aggressive and targeted austerity, then we should be ready with new modes of researching, analyzing, thinking, presenting, practicing, and publishing. I have little interest in such new modes, however, if they don’t simultaneously provide and allow a freeing of the general libido, in addition to the general intellect. (Collaboration itself, for instance, should be a form of Eros.) Knowledge need not be dry and intimidating. It can work against ‘the forgetting of Being’ (which, ironically, the Heidegger Intellectual Complex has seemingly forgotten).

What new possibilities for amorous practices may come from Specula- tive Realism or non-anthropocentric thinking?

Hmmmmm. Speculative Realism is so fragmented, contested—and frankly, maligned—these days that it is difficult to give a clear answer to this question. However, the gestalt of that particular intellectual inter- vention may prompt us to speculate ourselves about this. (And I like the more general language of ‘amorous practices’ you provide here, rather than the reified notion of ‘love itself’.)

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First, I think of Ian Bogost’s notion of “alien phenomenology” (2012) in which the privileged subject experientially parsing the local universe is not necessarily a human being, but, say, a bat or a Kodachrome cam- era. This notion asks, ”what, beyond the human, can ‘experience’ the world? And how might we imagine or render such this experience of radical alterity?” Well, we can just replace ‘the world’ with ‘amorous practices’ here and come up with a fun party game! Similarly, Graham Harman’s renewed attention to the monadic isolation of the object could potentially provide a schema or language for detailing the various ways—both dramatic and banal—in which there is no sexual relation- ship. (To briefly bring back Lacan, in order to give his famous dictum a new, non-human spin.) Science fiction writers, however, are light-years ahead of these academic import strategies, and I think I would prefer to spend precious reading time on these, if we are specifically looking for new erotic possibilities that decenter human-centric discourse. (Timothy Morton’s provocation of “the ecological thought” is also worth men- tioning here, since no romance or passion today can afford to ignore its context in the Anthropocene; cf. Morton 2012)

Nearly 20 years ago, Steven Shaviro (2002) asked us—with refer- ence to Bjork’s beautiful music video for “All is Full of Love”—whether cyborgs experience pleasure and intimacy more exquisitely than we do. (As Shaviro advocated on social media more recently: “Diffusely affiliative passions, rather than exclusionary [intimate or erotic] ones”). Likewise, Spike Jonze’s film Her is a thought-provoking portrait of non-anthropocentric passion. (As James Gleik tweeted: “I’d say Her is a movie about [the education of] an interesting woman who falls in love with a man who, though sweet, is mired in biology.”; cf. Gleick 2014) Indeed, the inevitability of robotic companions or escorts is a topic for consistent conversation in the popular press; as well as an international conference of experts in the UK last year. (The Swedish TV show Real Humans, is a brilliant depiction of just such a possible near-future, and the ways in which sophisticated humanoid helpers might impact do- mestic arrangements and assumptions. As the pop singer Robyn sings: “Once you’ve gone tech you ain’t ever goin’ back.”)

Finally, I am immodest enough to mention my own recent book, Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human, which explores some of the ways in which humans rather surreptitiously acknowledge their animal heritage, when it comes to experiencing and expression intimacy. (Sappho herself describes love as a “creature” or “reptile-like thing.”; cf. Sappho 1953). As I write in the introduction:

Whether it is the texture of the beloved’s skin or hair, their singu- lar scent, the way they drool in their sleep, the way they eat with their mouth open, or the way they are trapped within their own umwelt of semiotic disinhibitors: we love the creaturely in the other,

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as much as their humanity. In fact, we could go so far as to insist that love is not a human phenomenon at all, but an attempt to make the other admit, under a type of passionate interrogation, that they are not human; never were human; were trying to fool us with their distracting, sophisticated ways. Love would thus be the litmus test which we all fail; and in doing so, ironically succeed. For we all suspect, at various levels of consciousness, that we are not really human. Or not only human.

(Pettman 2017)

What is the future of love in relation to technological evolution and the changing idea of subjectivity?

That’s the billion dollar question. And if I could answer this with con- fidence, then I could make a lot of money as a prophetic consultant in Silicon Valley. But returning full circle to the idea of networked love, I would not be surprised if our romantic lives continued to become more and more exhibitionist. Our amorous adventures will likely become in- creasingly curated, with an eye to impressing friends or followers, even if they have little interest in our new arm-candy. This is part and parcel of the kind of performative solipsism we see so often, in which intimacy is turned inside-out and put on display, in order to have it validated by the ‘mediators’ or ‘third terms’ which Girard (Desire, Deceit, and the Novel) talks about so persuasively. In this sense, digital media is merely revealing the immanent triangular structure of love with x-ray clarity.

Given the ascendency of “the quantified self” (Lupton, The Quantified Self) and all the various tools we have to monitor our bodies and behaviors in real time, I anticipate that love may become more competitive. Just as the FitBit encourages people to measure their daily steps against others, Apple watches and other devices will allow us to create all sorts of spreadsheets and infographics about our epic love-making sessions, or general romantic endorphin levels. Love may even become gamified, to the extent that our amorous gestures will, if promoted correctly, be rewarded by sponsored products, and thus enlisted in the endless clamor for brand-share.

On a less dystopian note, these new technologies might afford so many views on to the generic nature of ‘the other’ that we start to cease the obsession with originality or uniqueness, and absorb the profound lesson of our essential interchangeability. This in turn may allow us to become less white-knuckled when it comes to our default narcissism and insecurities. This may sound like I’m advocating a kind of name brand humanity, with no space for singularity or mold-breaking. Quite to the contrary, I believe deeply in the special connection the lover creates with the beloved. But at the same time, this unique combination swims around within a sea of very similar gestures, expressions, and experiences. (This is why almost every pop song speaks to us, when we are thrilling in love

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or heart-broken.) The profound paradox of our own irreplaceability and interchangeability is the enigma of love that we may never fully grasp, but which I think we intuit within our bones when we are in love. When we send love messages, we are addressing more than simply each other; even as we would like to find ourselves marooned alone on a desert is- land, like in Blue Lagoon. Your chosen beloved is the most beautiful of all people because she or he so perfectly embodies their kind. They are simultaneously only themselves and the ideal representative of a genus. In other words, no individual is only themselves. (And this is the lesson of Diotima’s speech in The Symposium: a lesson we continue to ignore at our own cost, distracted, as we eternally are, by Aristophanes’ far more simple model of two severed halves re-finding each other.) This is a vague and long-winded way of saying that new digital tools can potentially—if we chose to prioritize something more than share holder profit—encourage new ways of eliciting love; new ways even of defin- ing what love looks, feels, sounds, smells, and tastes like; and who or what qualifies as lovable. Beyond frictionless hookup cultures, we might recode the current amorous operating system beyond jealousy and re- striction, and towards experimentation, generosity, curiosity, and more capacious renderings of fidelity.

What do we understand by the idea of ‘the post-material world’? And consequently, in what way are amorous practices a part of cultural materialism(s)?

I actually have been hearing less and less discussion of a ‘post-material’ world in a moment when so many theoretically inclined people are ex- cited by ‘the new materialism’. But I suppose this phrase would mark a return to the sense that our world is becoming increasingly virtual. To be sure, that is nothing but a fantasy, since we will never upload our minds or souls to the Network. N. Kathryn Hayles (2008) convincingly put an end to that nonsense a couple of decades ago, in How We Became Posthuman. Then again (and isn’t there always a then again?), Oculus Rift and similar companies have finally started releasing home Virtual Reality kits, and our minds are likely to spend more and more time in digital representations of imaginary spaces. But that doesn’t make the world any less material. It just adds another layer on to our mental ex- periences. Before VR, however, we spent a lot of time watching TV or movies, or reading novels, but this didn’t lead to so many claims that we were entering post-material times. Human cognition, as Kant already understood, is always a combination of physical things, perceptions, and intangible imaginings. Our species-being (inflected through cultural ori- entation) emerges from this interface; and the dialectic isn’t going any- where, as long as we continue to exist at all. I do anticipate, however, that the ambient desire of our hyper-urban lives will leave us with not enough things to caress or care for. (Digital pets, for instance, will never

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satisfy our sensoriums in the way that a dog or cat does. And the same can be said for lovers.)

Every few months, a news story flashes by about a new device or app that can bridge time and space. I’m thinking of a recent example of ‘kissing phones’, where you can supposedly feel the kiss of an ab- sent lover, thanks to a special ‘smart’ mouthpiece. But these kinds of gestures will always languish in the creepy or pathetic realm; even if they may provide some people with temporary, surrogate comforts. The truth is that amorous practices require material things to practice on and with. Our libidos have been shaped and primed by the textures and thingliness of erotic memories, triggers, fetishes, and so on. Desire is essentially haptic, even when it is only the eye or the mind doing the grasping. We postmoderns still have a strong Platonic-Gnostic bent; valuing the ideal, transcendent form from which all actualities are but fallen prototypes from a perfect, never adequately rendered numinous blueprint. As a result, we tend to value the idea above the instance (at least in our public declarations): value is measured by its distance from thingliness or brute actuality. (This is why women are obliged to hide, or at least downplay, an ostensible ultra-materiality that me- dieval theology in particular saddled them with, and from which men are relatively unburdened; speaking in terms of ideology, rather than physiology. Consider, for instance, how the prescribed cure for a male broken heart, nearly a thousand years ago, was to dwell on the dis- gusting innards and leakages of the beloved, as if this were unique to one gender.)

In any case, the practice of making love will always involve many levels, registers, and types of technics. As Barthes famously writes: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire” (Barthes 2002). So to say, we will always be en- gaged in what Bernhard Siegert (2015) calls “cultural techniques,” even in spheres of privileged intimacy. And these techniques will involve an alliance (never fully improvised) of material and symbolic elements. The task for those who seek to understand the mechanics of the amorous event—and its aftermath—is not to insist on one side or the other, but to pay close attention to the ways in which they reinforce and/or challenge each other; as well as the degrees to which this represents and extension of—or departure from—historical conventions.

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