There is a scene in Tom Tykwer’s rather pedestrian filmRun Lola Run(1998)¹ when the two protagonists—Lola (Franka Potente) and her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu)—lie in bed discussing the random nature of love and existence. Lola asks Manni that age-old question which lovers often pose their partners: “Why me? Of all the people in the world, why did you pick me?” As we know, one of the main functions of romantic narrative is to weave all the strands of coincidence and contingency together in such a way that the lovers feel compelled to believe in the benign...

Let us imagine the first handshake. This gesture, ubiquitous in the West and therefore increasingly common throughout the world, extends back into the mythological mists of commerce and community. The handshake signals a greeting, an introduction, a contract made, and an understanding achieved. In a quotidian version of Michelangelo’s finger-touch between God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, one being confronts another and makescontact. A border is crossed (the gulf separating two persons) and is simultaneously affirmed (since the two pressed palms continue to mark the point at which one person is distinguished from the other)....

In the mid-1990s a new technology debuted on our screens. Known colloquially as Bullet Time,¹ it employs a full 360-degree ring of cameras which simultaneously capture an object and moment from all angles. This effectively “freezes time,” so that the spectator can virtually move around a person spilling a glass of orange juice or (in the case of one Nike advertisement) a bicycle falling and-yet not falling. It suddenly became possible to freeze the exact moment of a glass exploding, each fragment caught perfectly in the timeless moment of combustion. Or of a woman throwing a pillow at her lover...

J. G. Ballard’s business park for the technocratic elite, Eden-Olympia, has its own grinning Cheshire cat, a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Wilder Penrose, whose “grimace of pleasure seemed to migrate around his face, colonizing new areas of amiability” (171). Penrose oversees the general well-being of the talented and highly paid workaholics who comprise the population of this “virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like asonet-lumièrevision of a new Versailles” (8)—a “humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city” (5). As such, Penrose takes it upon himself to engineer a suitable set of living arrangements for this...

I am sitting on a stationary bus, leaning my head against the window and feeling pensive; as people often do when they are alone on public transport. Presently, another bus pulls up right beside me, forcing a stranger’s face directly into my field of vision, only three feet away and in a similar pensive, head-leaning position. She is rather indistinct, but her presence is undeniable, and there follows an extended moment of awkwardness as we wait for the lights to change. We exchange glances but can’t very well continue staring into each other’s eyes, at least not without doing some...

In Stanley Kubrick’s final film,Eyes Wide Shut(1999), the protagonist, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise), requires a password to enter the Bletchly Manor. This password is “Fidelio.” He has been banished into the night by his own jealous demons, unleashed by his wife’s confession that she fantasizes about other men. The specter of the third term (in this case, a phantasmatic “man in uniform”) prompts a sexual panic, and Harford wanders New York on his own libidinal odyssey, hoping to recover his wounded masculine vanity. Once inside the mansion, Harford witnesses an elaborate orgy, conducted by anonymous...

Consider the little games lovers play with each other. You know the kind: “Would you still love me if I was in a horrible accident and lost both my legs? Or if my face became paralyzed and I always spoke likethis? Or if I lost my job and had to clean toilets? Or if I suddenly started wearing those jeans with the transparent pockets we saw yesterday in that shop window?” The perfectly reasonable assumption is that beneath this litany of horrors is a unique being worthy of being loved, a being immune from physical distortion or fashion disasters....

At Waterloo underground station in London, all commuters are warned repeatedly by loudspeakers to “mind the gap” when a train approaches the station, a reference to the rather large space between the platform and the carriage. This piece of advice is just as useful when considering the various gaps between the self and the other, as when stepping from the platform onto the tube.

Take, for instance, this extract from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being andNothingness:

I experience myself as any transcendence: to go from the subway station at “Tracadéro” to “Sévres-Babylon,” “They” change at “La Motte-Picquet.” This change is foreseen,...

In that particular genealogy linking Baudelaire to Michel de Certeau via Benjamin, Musil, andThe Man with a Movie Camera(1929), the city is figured through a kind of semichoreographedballet mécanique. While we may not be able to talk of harmony, there is certainly some kind of order in the to-ings and fro-ings of the city, especially when viewed from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.¹ Various patterns emerge, which may or may not be predictable but whose flux can be traced through the dynamic assemblages that comprise the condition of their movement. Specific strange attractors come...

We have covered a lot of territory since the opening pages of this book.

From the outset, we noted that technology is, above all, a set of relations. We then established, even more strikingly, that technology underpins thewillto relations themselves (even if such a will is initiated for self-seeking purposes). Those discourses which support, mediate, and transmit “love” and “community” were thenre-presented as technological forms—not in the instrumentalist sense ofTechnik, but rather in the spirit oftechneandpoiesis, as a mode of revealing or “bringing forth.”

But the question remains: What exactly is brought...