Czy można badać tak skomplikowane zjawisko, jakim jest miłość? Choć zdawać by się mogło, że miłości nie da się poddać analizie, to jednak jej psychologiczne, społeczne i kulturowe aspekty można szczegółowo opisać. Prof. UŚ dr Ania Malinowska udowadnia, że „kochanie” urzeczywistnia się poprzez różne narzędzia, techniki i instrumenty – technologie, które stanowią naturalną drogę miłości.
Uczucia i emocje, postawy i relacje – zdaniem badaczki miłość to także system znaczeń kulturowych oraz tradycja wyrażania, uzasadniania i legitymizacji zachowań związanych z kochaniem. Nadchodzący wykład „Semiotic Technologies of Love” poruszy zarówno biologiczne, jak i kulturowe konteksty miłości, a także pokaże, co technologie mówią o doświadczeniach emocjonalnych i afektywnych.
Spotkanie rozpocznie się 24 kwietnia o godz. 15:00 w auli A4 na Wydziale Filologicznym UŁ (ul. Pomorska 171/173).
Abstract: Love is many things. First, it is a feeling: an emotion, a state, an attitude, a reaction, an intra- and interpersonal relation. It is also a system of cultural significations: a tradition of expressing, justifying and legitimizing behaviors associated with the feeling of love. But first and foremost, love is a practice, a way of doing and cultivating whatever and however that feeling manifests. It hence entails a number of tools, techniques and instruments — or put broadly, technologies — that organize those manifestations and become love’s second nature. The correlation of love and technology has two sides. One is inscribed into the biology of bonding (and culture that follows): the Cupid’s arrow effect, the increased dopamine level, love poems and the urge for affectionate expression, kissing, longing etc. This side reflects the instincts and praxes induced by the feeling of love and love agency. Pitirim Sorokin (1982) linked it with “the ways and power of love” and was the first one to explicitly consider love a technology. The other is infrastructural and concerns the social and material systems and facilities that emerge from civilizational advancement: the media, devices, machinery and equipment, anything we produce to refine our living condition and what our biology adopts and utilizes to make love happen. Both the correlations highlight the immanence of technology for the experience of love and the role of technological progression in affective cultures. In other words: there is no love without technology and love in itself is an essentially technological occurrence.
This talk outlines the meanings of loving in technoculture and explains the ways and manners of “practicing of togetherness” in high-tech environments. It will show what technologies tell us about the way we love and how we can critically reread late modern paradigms of emotional and affective experiences, challenging the existing critical approaches to technological and technologized love.
Ania Malinowska is an author, cultural theorist and associate professor in media and cultural studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia (Poland), and a former Senior Fulbright Fellow at the New School in New York. Her research concentrates on cultural theory, love studies, digital humanities and critical robotics — with a special focus on the formation of cultural norms and the social, emotional and aesthetic codes in relation to digitalism.
