Repeat After Me: The Automatic Labours of Love

This essay considers love as a symbol represented by the heart, which is also the organ first used to define the term automatic. Love’s value as a symbol will be linked to certain forms of automation that indicate the dematerialisation of love’s labour and its qualities as a form of life. Key here is the understanding that love’s labours are most often associated with the figure of woman and in understanding automaticity as dispensing with causality.

We explore forms of automation characteristic of nineteenth century industrialization, through examples of speaking automata, romantic literature and labour. In the first instance, automata are seen to represent those with least power in Western societies, whose ventriloquized presence indicated a propensity for imitation and repetition. These automata can be seen to evince the magical absorption and disappearance of actual bodies and materials into systems of automation. Thereby, as Esther Leslie and Helen Hester have put it respectively, automated devices appear more animate than their operators or the bodies that they eventually replace (Leslie 2002; Hester 2016). For Marx, it was this quality of liveliness that characterised the commodity, being a repository for living labour that was associated with the vigorous, animate qualities of love (Marx 1990, 302). While according to Max Weber (2009), love’s animation functions as the “real”, vital force and promise that propels workers to accept the rational banality and routine of industrial working life. In this respect, love is an essential part of capital’s calculation and subjection to systems of automation.

In claiming that isolating the body of woman was capitalism’s greatest invention, Leopoldina Fortunati (1995) suggests that “free” emotional and domestic labour underpin the project of capitalist productivity. The body of woman itself becomes a machine for reproducing labour powers: a site where production and reproduction find their most “natural” expression. Distinguishing labour from work in accordance with post- Fordist feminist writing (Weeks 2007; Federici 2012, 20), we recall Silvia Federici’s claim that in order to remember what love is, we must first define work.

Paper in a special co-edited edition of Journal of Aesthetics and Culture: The Techniques and Aesthetics of Love in the Age of Big Data