Amorocenic baroque: the media technological complexification of romantic love

Romantic love entails a co-fabulation of the world, one in which media significantly intervene. This thesis examines the relational complexification of love by media technologies, considered in their inseparability from a ‘material-discursive’ Anthropocene whose very constitution is bound up with racial capitalism. Philosophical and critical approaches have strongly established what I refer to as the question of connection, i.e., whether profound connection between two people is possible in love. However, there is little scholarship on love in relation to the radical connectedness of the Anthropocene and how this relates to the technological mediation of romantic sociality. In this thesis, I answer the question of connection; explore how we can conceive of love’s connectedness within the Anthropocene context; examine how media technologies have complexified love; and speculate on political and aesthetic factors involved in the mediated fabulation of love. In doing so, I provide an ontological definition of love as an ongoing inter- and intra- active, quasi-relational and multi-dimensional process, demonstrating that the Anthropocene functions as crucial link between this ontological conception of love and the emergent manifestations of its milieu. I formulate an Amorocene as the problematic entangled scene and -cene of love, that constitutes a placeholder at the nexus of multiple -cenes. Focusing on complexification as the worlding mechanism of romantic connection, I argue that media technologies complexify love through their convolution (intrication and opacification), granularisation and abstraction of romantic relationality. I apply these figures of complexification to three key mediatic events––‘the myth of passion,’ the (post-)Enlightenment novel, and online dating––to examine the specific ways in which media technologies, romantic culture and sociality are co-constituted, coded and codified. Lastly, I explore intersecting political and aesthetic dimensions of romantic sociality with a focus on opacity which I suggest is both problematic and ephemerally liberatory. In this thesis, I cast the mediatic complexification of love as Amorocenic baroque i.e., ornate, accretive, excessive and surprising. Both inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary, critical and speculative; this thesis identifies and primarily contributes to the fledgling field of critical media love studies, bringing it into crucial relation with philosophy and complexity theory.