Dr. Strange(love) or: from affection-images to inter-faces

Adam Cichoń
(University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
The borderlines between love, technology and community in the post-digital age are really thin, if not completely blurred. The development of virtual reality goes hand in hand with the changing relationships between people. In the last few years cinematography has given us representations of something which can be called “strange love”. In movies such a
Her or Blade Runner we find protagonists who fall in love with an “interface”. For a long time authors such as Sherry Turkle tried to rethink how people are affected by non-human objects and why they can establish relationships with them. Thus, it is not surprising that science fiction movies explore these kind of stories. In his works, Dominic Pettman goes one step further and provides us with a concept which is adequate to that of “strange love”. For Pettman love is simply a kind of technology – technology of being together. In the end love is something that we make. From that perspective an inter-face is just another technology which helps us to be together or in other words – to “make” a love. But what exactly have interfaces to do with affects? To answer that question we have to go back to the notion of face which Pettman borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and which he transformed into the inter-face. In my paper I am going to explore that concept by juxtaposing it with another Deleuzian idea – the “affection-image” of which the face seems to be an important correlate. In some sense the digital age enables us to fulfill the Deleuze’s famous postulate – to escape the face, escape that horror story (as he called it). But even if we are living in the age of “strange love” is it a sufficient reason to learn to stop worrying and love the interface?

Adam Cichoń is a PhD student at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. He received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation which is focused on the expression in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema.