Abstract

There is a necessary connection to be made between Media Ecology and the emergent field of Critical Love Studies in order to understand how its embodied, affective qualities are experienced. A cultural and materialist discipline, media ecology exposes situated technologies and communication codes that inform human perception. Love Studies suggests that affect and affection are materially constituted and spread through connection. This connection can be read as a network of bodies, or a social body. Read together, Media Ecology and Love Studies elucidate how mimesis happens in the social and in excess of symbol. This comes to bear on poetics as a performance of relation— one with currency as a communication infrastructure that mediates between eros and agape, faithful only to the localization and circulation of difference. We learn from philosophies of difference that subjectivities are un/made through concepts of coupling. We learn from complexity models (Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and Peter Sloterdijk’s microsphereology) that coupling is, well, complex. We learn from semiology that language engenders particularly potent, evolving meshworks of material-semiotic couplings. We learn from media theory what shapes contemporary material-semiotic couplings take and how they behave. We learn from semiocapital that these couplings are politically charged. We learn from critical love studies that these couplings are queered. We learn from the form of the poetic couplet how to un/make difference. I explicate this circular lineage via a close reading and performance of original love poems to Bruce Springsteen.

Presenters

Kendall Grady
Student, PhD Candidate in Literature - Creative/Critical Concentration, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Creative Practice Showcase

Theme

The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life

KEYWORDS

Media Ecology, Critical Love Studies, Affect, Social, Performance, Semiology, Poetry

Digital Media

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