Culture and Media Studies

"“[T]houghtful, wide-ranging, and eloquently written . . . .The argument cannot be reduced to any single simplistic thesis, and this is one of its major strengths. It acknowledges and affirms complexity, and yet it presents this complexity in a compellingly clear manner. In short, Pettman is a fine critic, both in terms of breadth of reference and understanding, and in terms of subtlety and thought . . . a superb piece of work.” - Steven Shaviro

"Absolutely remarkable." - Jean Baudrillard"

There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: 'The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this article is that of virtual girlfriends and boyfriends: whether in the form of avatars or automated SMS text messages. This particularly Japanese 'craze', if we can call it that, fascinates and appals people who still hold P2P romance IRL in high-esteem. It seems like an insult to the intrinsically human and humanist discourse of courtship; and indeed it is. How does this perspective change, however, if we consider 'love' as a technology? That is, as both a code with its own algorithmic parameters, and a discourse that also challenges the hyper-rational assumptions of the 'merely machinic'. Extending the argument articulated in my book, Love and Other Technologies, this article asks how the emergence of virtual dating and other techno-inflected treatments of romance are working to undo our jealously held notions of intimacy and identity. It concludes that all sex can be considered cybersex, given the communication flows that occur both before, during and after the act. For, as we continue to enframe the discourse of intimacy via new and mobile media, we find it increasingly difficult to deny that intensified intersubjectivity is always already a matter of technics. Indeed, what Heidegger says of modern technology can effectively be applied to modern love: that it embodies an 'unreasonable demand' of nature (and thus has the capacity to reveal something essential about the posthuman condition).

Tolstoy’s remarkably economical novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). This article identifies not only the “bestial” element of human sexuality in Tolstoy’s story, but the array of animals which the author offers to ventriloquize a certain complex (and times confused) polemic about gender relations. In other words, this analysis offers an interpetation of The Kreutzer Sonata as bestiary; one which offers a moral taxonomy of creaturely life and creaturely love. From the green-eyed monster of jealousy itself, through the Venus fly-trap and porcine couple, right up to the wild murderous beast, Pozdnyshev’s confession is read via this zoological trope in order to emphasize, and question, that mobile border which separates the human from the inhuman, the civilized from the uncivilized. And it does so in order to highlight the incoherencies of the anthropocentric discursive regulation of this very same borderline. Animality and animosity are thus presented as the twin avatars of Tolstoy’s intense and challenging vision.

Key words

Animality, animosity, Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, sexual jealousy, zoological tropes.

It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather dispersed into countless different emotional micro-experiences? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the same time? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video. And, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity.

In this short and provocative book, Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls hypermodulation, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention, in which we are busily clicking ourselves to death. This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.

In an eminently approachable work of wide cultural reach and meticulous scholarship, Dominic Pettman undertakes an unprecedented examination of how animals shape the understanding and expression of love between people. He argues that in our utilization of the animal in our amorous expression, we acknowledge that what we adore in our beloveds is not (only) their humanity, but their creatureliness.