{"id":118009,"date":"2017-11-13T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T18:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118009"},"modified":"2017-11-17T15:33:53","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T20:33:53","slug":"screen-enamoration-love-age-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/13\/screen-enamoration-love-age-google\/","title":{"rendered":"The Screen of Enamoration: Love in the Age of Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the\u00a0sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. While revivals of Deleuze<\/a>, Lacan<\/a>, Foucault<\/a>, and even Derrida<\/a> abound as potential solutions to the social, cultural, and economic problems plaguing the planet, Barthes rarely pops his head outside of the undergraduate classroom. As a serious political conversation piece, love, too, has gone out of fashion. While the hippie movement of Barthes\u2019s own generation united love with countercultural politics, today such attempts seem disengaged and out of touch. A data-pull from Google Scholar articles shows that academic work on love has halved in the past five years. The more pressing our political struggles become, the more love recedes into the background.<\/p>\n

So in a time when even football has become a stage for protest, does love somehow manage to retain amnesty from politics? Even when we think about some of history\u2019s most turbulent moments, love manages to divorce itself from the political sphere. Take, for example, Bernardo Bertolucci\u2019s 2003 movie\u00a0Dreamers<\/em>, a romance set in the midst of the French 1968 riots. While Molotov cocktails are going off hourly on the streets, the characters, ensconced in their bourgeois Parisian apartment, are given vast distance from their context to experiment with sex and love.<\/p>\n

Bertolucci\u2019s brilliant movie embodies a long tradition of holding love separate from political concerns, but lately things seem to have shifted. Today, far-right agitators are mining OKCupid<\/em><\/a> for data that proves white supremacy; Tinder<\/em> is leading us into a Silicon Valley dystopia<\/a>; Grindr<\/em> is fomenting a revolution in desire<\/a>; and pop-philosophers are agonizing over whether love can survive<\/a> postmodernity and the power of Big Data. In light of this new and violent reunion between politics and love, I would like to make a brief case here for a serious re-engagement with Roland Barthes. His work on love, in particular, just might repoliticize love in the digital age and make visible a corporate organization of desire\u2014a technology of love\u2014that the progressive left will soon have to confront.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In The Radicality of Love<\/em>, arguably the most important book about love published in recent years, Croatian philosopher Sre\u0107ko Horvat questions that quixotic tendency to partition love from politics. He opposes the argument made a few years earlier in Alain Badiou\u2019s In Praise of Love<\/em>, which argues for love\u2019s ability to escape the political\u2014another indication that something might have changed since 2012. In fact, Horvat argues that in recent years the right has managed to manipulate the public\u2019s emotions much better than the left, including love: new technologies of dating, communication, and virtual partnerships encourage us to love the image of ourselves and reject difference and otherness, favoring right-wing discourse. Even if this bias is incidental, and not the deliberate intent of technology companies\u2014by no means a foregone conclusion\u2014Horvat argues that the left will need a similarly new kind of political engagement with love to combat these trends. To be sure, recent projects on the left, such as the campaign for marriage equality in Australia and the backlash against the new porn laws in the UK, recognize that the political and legal world impinge on the personal world of relationships. But these movements must be accompanied by a more comprehensive understanding, as Horvat argues, that love is always, and always has been, political. Such movements go some way to show that what we need is not a \u201cpolitics of love\u201d (as people have argued from the sixties to now<\/a>) but an attitude toward love that acknowledges its political nature.<\/p>\n

By 1977, Barthes had already acknowledged as much in Fragments d\u2019un discours amoureux <\/em>(A Lover\u2019s Discourse<\/em>), perhaps his most psychoanalytic text. A Lover\u2019s Discourse <\/em>is also\u2014under the surface at least\u2014an analysis of technology. In a section entitled \u201cravishment,\u201d Barthes discusses the moment when we \u201cfall\u201d in love: a \u201csupposedly initial episode (though it may be reconstructed after the fact) during which the amorous subject is \u2018ravished\u2019 (captured and enchanted) by the image of the loved object.\u201d Such moments, Barthes says, go by the popular\u00a0term \u201clove at first sight,\u201d but demand the scholarly name \u201cenamoration\u201d (an anachronistic term that Barthes adopts). For Barthes, enamoration is a \u201chypnosis\u201d that sets the subject on a path from which they cannot deviate. We suffer enamoration as an electrifying blow, inflicting in us a \u201cwound\u201d that cannot heal until the object of desire is \u201ccaptured.\u201d In other words, the object of desire dooms us to pursue it, even when doing so might be irrational and costly. When we are enamored, we \u201cneed\u201d the object in order to be complete, though of course it is this mirage of fulfillment that constitutes enamoration\u2019s illusion.<\/p>\n

This is Barthes at his closest to Freud, but it\u2019s also Barthes at his closest to Marx. We should take his remarks as referring not only\u2014or perhaps not even primarily\u2014to the lover but to \u201cthe loved object,\u201d which is to say everything that works to consume our attention: our iPhones, our designer shoes, our sushi. Barthes refers to both the lover and the commodity, as well as the connections between them. The language of \u201chypnosis\u201d and of being \u201cfascinated by the image\u201d puts commodification at the heart of falling in love. Although Barthes\u2019s criticism is directed toward an emerging world of commodities, he never engages in nostalgia for a love free from politics. Instead he describes a perennial process of consecration by which the object of desire is set on stage in a prepared scene for the \u201csubject\u201d (us) to fall in love with:<\/p>\n

The first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness (what makes me irresponsible, subject to fatality, swept away, ravished): and of all the arrangements of objects, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts \u2026 I am initiated: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the city\u2014from the Parisian arcades immortalized by Walter Benjamin to the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es and Eiffel Tower of Barthes\u2019s own work\u2014was once the stage on which people fell in love, then today\u2019s stage is the screen of the mobile phone. In this new technological theater, all of us are herded into position by complex algorithms and codes. Technologies have always structured the scenes with which and in which we fall in love, but new technologies have dramatically transformed these scenes, and, in the process, transformed love itself. Love, then, cannot exist outside of history, and will always play out against the political and technological set pieces of the day. While love \u201cat first sight\u201d might seem sudden and instinctual, the scene has in fact been carefully set. What Barthes asks is not that we reject this situation, but simply that we recognize it and pay attention to the forces that arrange and prepare the objects of our desire: the politics which construct the moment of falling in love.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere I argued that Pok\u00e9mon GO<\/em> was a kind of testing phase for Google\u2019s technologies of social organization,<\/a> placing, as it did, so many objects of desire in urban locations to maximize profit. Barthes, though, would argue that we are dealing with much more than a profit scheme. Instead, what we might call technocapitalist corporations\u2014Silicon Valley tech giants that acquire and organize more and more online space each month\u2014are fundamentally changing the process of falling in love. As users of technology in the \u201csmart city,\u201d we fall in love with the Pikachu when he pops up on our screen and set off in desperate search of him, almost instantaneously. We fall equally hard for the image of a lover on Tinder<\/em> or Grindr<\/em> (which shares a program interface with Pok\u00e9mon GO<\/em>), or even with the image of a meal as it appears on Seamless\u00a0<\/em>or Grubhub<\/em>. As Barthes\u2019s works tell us, this kind of connection between technology, politics, and love places the most power in the hands of those who set the scenes of our enamoration, who determine what and how we desire.<\/p>\n

While early proponents of the internet assumed it would be a democratizing and heterogeneous space, it is an increasingly small group of power holders who control this network of desire. IAC owns OkCupid<\/em>, Match, Tinder<\/em>, and a hundred other companies, and Google controls the way we relate to everything from restaurants to Pok\u00e9mon. Gaming corporation Beijing Kunlun Tech\u2019s surprise acquisition of Grindr<\/em>\u2014a formerly independent and subversive application\u2014 shows again that love is assimilated into wider patterns of tech development. Behind today\u2019s proscenium lie technocapitalists and a host of programmers whose products are increasingly subsumed by a small group of major conglomerates, centralizing the space to program our screens and set our desires on their course.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe myth of love at first site is so powerful,\u201d writes Barthes, \u201cthat we are astonished if we hear of someone deciding<\/em> to fall in love.\u201d The association between desire and spontaneity, Barthes argues, is such a well-entrenched ideology that it seems impossible to escape. It may not be easy, or even possible, to take control of the process and decide when and how to love\u2014when it comes to people or to objects. However, what Barthes\u2019s work calls for is an analysis of the scenes and screens in which enamoration occurs. Whether or not we can<\/em> decide to fall in love, it has already been decided for us, the scene set by political and technological powers beyond our control. Horvat is correct that the right has been able to manipulate desires to serve their ends. We should respond in the way that Barthes laid out a long time ago: by rendering visible the politics of desire and recognizing that technologies of enamoration now dictate our movements, organize the citizenry, and even influence elections. We need to remember Barthes\u2019s lesson that love is always political, no matter how intoxicating and spontaneous it feels, and work to reveal the politics behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alfie Bown is coeditor of the <\/em>Hong Kong Review of Books and author of two books on technology and psychoanalysis, <\/em>Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism\u00a0and <\/em>The PlayStation Dreamworld. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, Roland Barthes is among the less trendy of the famed French theorists of the\u00a0sixties and seventies, or at least one of those considered less germane to our current moment. 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