Computer Love

This article takes Joshua Clover's argument that poetry gives different speculative ways of charting shifts in cultural production since the economic crisis as its point of departure: the 1970s, which marks a global recession, the emergence of neoliberalism, and the end of the Civil Rights/Black Power era, as well as the emergence of the personal computer, is an important antecedent for the present conjuncture. The article considers the rise of computational poetics as an outgrowth of the earlier Conceptual poetry, on the one hand, and a longer history whereby both computational techniques, data, and the idea of poetic expression have been racialized. Considering the ways makalani bandele and Lilian-Yvonne Betram respectively use computational techniques to randomize output and declare affiliation with the past, the ultimate argument is that the computational is also an affective posture for managing unwanted intimacies.