Miscellaneous romance no.1

The Miscellaneous Romance Project is a modular set of pieces based on 'missed connections' ads on craigslist and other sites. Ideally, each performance will adapt to local and current texts. Program notes by Shaka McGlotten:Frank Sinatra croons, “As time goes by”. It's easy to look at digitally mediated intimacies as evidence that time has gone by, but not in the right sorts of ways. Is a kiss still a kiss, do the fundamental things still apply when people go online to connect? To some, Craigslist personal ads might seem a strange place to look for love or sex. This is especially true because we are conditioned to understand relationships as taking place only within particular times and places. Dominant cultural scripts about intimacy tell us that it should occur in what some queer theorists have called “straight time,” an idealized temporality of how to live a life, or a good one. Straight time demands that you grow up, get educated, get a job, settle down. Intimacy is snapped into the story of a linear life course: you meet someone, you go on dates, dates become more serious, and this seriousness is codified through some ritual process, like?moving in and shopping at Ikea, or marriage. And all of this should occur within the confines of the “real” world, in restaurants, bars, offices, and private bedrooms. However, dominant narratives of intimacy cannot capture the irregular or inconstant stutter of desire, the ways desire frequently disorganizes our stable sense of ourselves, or the way our most profound longings for connection can never be fully satiated by the forms (coupled, monogamous with a house and kids) our society sanctions. Normative scripts of an intimate life lived right govern our attitudes toward “virtual intimacies,” those intimacies that do not conform to ideals about what constitutes a real intimate life lived in the right order. “Virtual intimacy” thus captures the mocking disapproval our culture expresses toward those forms of intimate connection that take place outside of straight time and space, forms that include, among many others, the extended adolescence or permanent bachelorhood of some gay men (and women), the entangled fictive kinship networks of some lesbian communities, or public sex, polyamory, or looking for sex in the ether of cyberspace. To say that something is virtual is to say that it is almost, but not quite, the real deal. This is the meaning that comes to mind when we hear the phrase “virtual reality,” for instance.??Yet there are other meanings of the virtual. For the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze virtuality describes an immanent force that has not actualized into form. The virtual is a capacity; it refers to the latent capacities of a thing, the probable forms it has the potential to take. Desire, before it's crystallized into sentimental Hallmark card slogans or coherent stories about how we met our significant others, is virtual. It has the potential to take many forms. It is a powerful immanence, like a leviathan waiting under the surface. And it is generative—we act, sometimes in embarrassing ways, in response to this force that presses on us. Miscellaneous Romance expresses all of these senses of virtual intimacy. It evokes the mediated, transactional, even mechanized, form desire takes in digital contexts. In a world in which every human feeling has morphed into a commodity form, it should not be so surprising that people would turn to the anonymous space of the net to express their longings more freely, without the threat of censure and in the hope that someone's lonely heart feels a tug of recognition on the other side of the screen. Miscellaneous Romance also suggests, however ubiquitous these spaces have become, that looking for intimacy in these contexts does not quite sit right with many of us—how can we find “real” or “true” love in a virtual space? We imagine others, or ourselves, sitting alone at our computers, our hopes and failings illuminated by the light of screen. In this sense, we can understand online personals as mirrors, not just vistas onto other worlds we'd someday like to explore. Miscellaneous Romance manages to dwell in the vast potential immanent to desire. The long strings of numbers that identify postings and the amplification that occurs when people's expression of longing begin to overlap with one another together suggest the magnificent and generative capacity of our desire for romance and connection, miscellaneous or otherwise.-    Shaka Paul McGlotten