“I have elsewhere considered love from the point of view of two technical systems of delivery and distribution that reflect this split between a temporal, calculable, analog discourse, and an ultra-rapid, digital, and computational one.”
“Friedrich Kittler might refer to these as discrete discourse machines, considered according to the technical devices and systems of communication they deploy.”
“We can differentiate between a literary (predigital) and a computational (postdigital) discourse machine. Both participate in distributing love’s codes and behaviors through social systems.”
“In the literary (often epistolary) system of predigital romantic narrative, longing and “repining from afar” were techniques of romantic calculation that testified to the resolve of the beloved in remaining true.”
“This logic of probabilistic calculation is a feature of the literary regime of love.”
“Love and the lover must be continuous across space and time in order to demonstrate that they and their love remain true.”
“By way of devices such as the novel, the behaviors and thoughts associated with modern romantic love—longing; feverishness; obsession and the gendered overtures of seduction—become “felt” as elements of a natural condition, rather than understood as the result of a technical arrangement.”
“This encoding takes place through machines of discourse.”
“Kittler highlights the fact that romantic love was entirely cultural and calculable rather than natural and incalculable. Its appropriate codes were imbibed by recitation, which was also internalization.”
“Subsequently, in the generalized literary discourse machine of the nineteenth century, love and woman become seemingly natural conditions that are synonymous figures of literature and foreground the male author and protagonist as figures and purveyors of culture.”
“Women, love, and nature no longer speak for themselves, but are the naturalized, and natural, concepts of male authorial contemplation.”
“In this case, far from being natural or a priori, love only takes place via the media technologies that distribute its idea.”
“By insisting on the agency of machines and the cultural quality of love, Kittler dispels the received understanding of love as something that takes place separately from technical systems. Instead, technical systems are integrated into its condition.”
“We have already noted that literature implicitly restratifies and naturalizes power structures, such as gendered identities, that seem to be not only natural but, according to Luhmann, also democratic. With the novel came a new reflexive interiority through which the reader could internalize and preempt the other, providing a coda for the management of passion.”
“In summary, love’s contingent features and its relation to chance are highlighted by the discourse machine of fiction that attempts to embed its lessons as features of natural conduct.”
“Calculation is the technique through which love comes to assert its function as a determination in an increasingly secular, chaotic world, as Luhmann would suggest. Love in the literary discourse machine is thus expressive of contingency, probability, and calculation.”
“Yet love will be considered differently, depending which discourse machine facilitates it. While love in the literary discourse machine referred to by Luhmann and Kittler can be considered a calculation of chance, in the digital computational discourse machine that succeeds it, love is rather a computation that highlights the limitations and contingency of probabilistic calculation.”
“If predigital forms of love are dominated by the calculation and the co-determination of the couple, postdigital, algorithmic systems of accelerating computability make love less, rather than more, deterministic, even though dating websites are keen to convince us otherwise.”
“In the volumes of sites, potential partners, and proclamations of others who claim to be “looking for love,” we see a general acceleration of contingency. Love no longer functions to deliver us from chance and into the relative security of probability, but rather into accelerating indeterminacy.”
“Love and intimacy no longer function to shield us from the “immense complexity and contingency of all the things, which could be deemed possible,” but facilitate increasing access to complexity, contingency, and possibility. In an online context, love comes to be defined by novelty, differentiation, and incomputability.”
“The notion of remaining true is understood differently from within each of the discourse machines. In the postdigital era of ubiquitous computation, this refers to incomputable data which, while being true, is not logically expressible.”
“Gödel’s theory of incompleteness states that reason is not limited to calculability. Incompleteness can be expressed in simple linguistic terms by the liar’s paradox, which consists in uttering, “This statement is not true.””
“Neither true nor false points of formula can be derived. Such logic anticipates Alan Turing’s problem of incomputability, which has been understood to describe the condition of mathematical reason as irreducibly complex.”
“Turing’s theory of incomputability suggested that there was no way of knowing whether a computer program commanded to “run” would ever come to a halt. He named this the “halting function,” a problem that has yet to be resolved.”
“Gregory Chaitin claims that it is not possible to demonstrate that any computer program chosen at random will ever halt; no algorithm or mathematical theory could ever calculate this potential, unless it were a value less than 0 and more than 1. Chaitin names such a hypothetical value “omega”—a well-defined number that cannot be computed in its entirety.”
“He takes this as evidence that calculability always contains an irreducible uncertainty. In this case, we see that while computation is often aligned with expedience, convenience, and hyperrationality, it can also be considered as deeply complex, alluding to new forms of logic associated with undecidability, incompletion, and the incomputable.”
“The true, while being contingent and incompressible, is true nevertheless. Thus the calculability of relative truth that we assumed in the predigital discourse machine cannot be assumed in the postdigital one.”
“We will see that such uncertainty extends to subjects and understandings of narrative and agency more generally.”
“Thus as Stephen Barrett and Frank Whitehead put it so saliently, “the historical centrality of the male … [in] writing, philosophy and political practice has served to make men invisible, particularly to themselves.””
“The capacity for simulation by media systems reminds us that the humans, too, are performative entities, simulations whose understanding of themselves is actually facilitated by matrices of mediation.”
“We can see computational systems and their devices as features of human control.”
“Much digital communication functions at the level of machine-to-machine data transmissions, governed by protocol that exists between device and the application layer of encoding. In other words, a great deal of information is neither readable nor calculable by humans, but only between machines. The application layers that encode messages on the internet, including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), are architectures of control that determine what can be seen and delivered across digital space.”