Boredom amuses only its critics. They struggle against their own lassitude to keep their indignation up to date. Theodor Adorno: “The teams of modern sport, whose interaction is so precisely regulated that no member has any doubt about his role, and which provide a reserve for every player, have their exact counterpart in the sexual teams of Juliette, which employ every moment usefully, neglect no human orifice, and carry out every function. Intensive, purposeful activity prevails in spirit in every branch of mass culture, while the inadequately initiated spectator cannot divine the difference in the combinations, or the meaning of variations, by the arbitrarily determined rules.” In gamespace, porno, like sport, now has its star pitchers and hitters, specialists for every position, and the inadequately initiated spectator once again cannot divine the difference in the combinations, or the meaning of variations, by the arbitrarily determined rules. But it is the same too with critical theory, which becomes formally indistinguishable from pornography, a mere subset of gamespace, a hypocritical theory, with different specialists, playing by different rules — equally worthy of de Sade.

A specter haunts America. “This specter of boredom, an exquisitely beautiful young man who yawns and walks around with a butterfly net to catch goldfish. He carries in his pocket a pedometer, a pair of nail scissors, a pack of cards, and all sorts of games based on optical illusions. He reads aloud the wording on posters and signs. He knows the newspapers by heart. He tells stories that nobody laughs at. He passes a hand of shadows over his eyes… punctuating his words with a terrible expletive: What’s the good? He cannot see a knob on an electric dial without turning it, a house without visiting it, a threshold without crossing it, a book without buying it. What’s the good? All without curiosity or pleasure but simply because one has to do something, and because here we are all the same, after all. And what was this ALL which swells up in the voice that pronounces it?” The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon provides the answer, as well as the question: nothing. Boredom is nothing, nothingness, the faintest touch of the void. In boredom you open toward something that does not open in return. It leaves nothing but indifference, neither one nor the other, the grunge of time, the lint that sticks to all things digital.

As that inconsolable philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer writes: “Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to [an A]topia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves….”. As this topology of fun and games spreads and congeals, carving out magic kingdoms indifferent to work and suffering, it carries within it the strange ectoplasm that both drives it and can overturn it — boredom. In our fantasmic America, a digital logistics sends turkeys flying around the highways ready-roasted. They come home to roost in the frozen foods section. Lovers meet with fleeting ease on the internet, and afterwards rank and rate their encounters, according to arbitrarily determined rules. And many do, indeed, die of boredom. Even if they don’t know it. The reserve armies of the bored zombie the earth, fiddling with their cellphones, checking their watches. Boredom is the meter of history.

If history is an endless list of things that should not have happened; boredom is what refuses not to happen. History distracts itself with heroic fables about the struggle to wrest freedom from necessity. Such is civilization, not to mention Civilization III. History has so much less to say about the decisive moment when freedom from necessity actually arrives. Neither civilization, nor Civilization III, knows what to do at the end, except perhaps dream of a sequel that is more of the same. John Berger: “Necessity produces both tragedy and comedy. It is what you kiss and bang your head against.” Without necessity, the storyline falters. Buzzcocks: “I’m living in this movie but it doesn’t move me.” What might be the content of this positive freedom, not freedom from but freedom to? At such times, there is nothing but boredom, the sticky lingering with nothingness itself. This is the moment of danger. Cyril Connolly: “The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to smoke opium, also gave birth to Surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs.”

“On the whole a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it.” So writes the rogue Surrealist Georges Bataille. This surplus may be gathered up and dispersed in spiritual quests or in making life over as a work of art. It can be squandered on bombs. Or it can be invested along the lines of strategic expansion or economic accumulation. This laying down of new lines, building from topic to topography to topology, only increases the surplus, and postpones and multiplies the problem: What to do with the idle capacities of a people? What to do with energies that so easily spill over into riot or revolt? What’s the good? Boredom is the ambivalent gift of the surplus. Boredom arises out of the absence of necessity, of a yes, a no, a straight line. Boredom demands new necessities, and if not granted them — produces its own. History is a struggle to wrest necessity from boredom. In this restless age, there’s nothing they won’t do to raise the standard of boredom under the flag of necessity. Constant revolutionizing of seduction, uninterrupted disturbance of all consumer relations, everlasting uncertainty and distraction, distinguish the military entertainment complex from all earlier powers. It must stay one step ahead of boredom, with which it deludes and with which it colludes.

(2) Comments for 151.
posted: 3/9/2007

awesome site design!
i really like how design and functionality reflect the meaning and nature of the book.
one thing (for amazing webmaster) about text on “book’s pages”: it looks nice in it’s size, but it’s hard to read on large monitor. i usually use browser option to increase pieces of text that i want to read without damaging my eyesight. doing it with “book pages” cuts the end of the chapter (css, overflow:hidden). i think, changing overflow to “auto” will add a little accessibility feature to the book.
–i.

McKenzie Wark responds to irena
posted: 4/14/2007

Irena: somebody wrote a patch to fix this. There was some reason Jesse didn’t use it, but it escapes me.

Leave a new comment
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
(1) Comments for 152.
posted: 7/31/2006

re: ‘all the same after all’ I would say: no: in Europe, where I live we’re ‘all the same’- in America, one is allowed to be a ‘star’ or ‘rich’ – ie: it’s okay. I’d say:..and because here we are all equal and all stars, after all – something more on this line. This is how the American, of which I am one, is seen in the world right now.

Leave a new comment
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
(10) Comments for 153.
posted: 5/23/2006

A coincidence: just this morning I read this line, from Susan Sontag’s The Imagination of Disaster:

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

McKenzie Wark responds to ed
posted: 5/23/2006

Thanks for the quote — i might put that one in!

posted: 5/31/2006

I cannot not intervene: only reading Schopenhauer’s viewpoint should not comfort us in that life of worry and toil, fearing every freed time as a potential gulf of boredom. Leisure or “schole” as the greek used to say (and which gave “school”) is what you win over your workday, it is one of the few meaningful moments, where you can practice philosophy, science, where you can meditate or share time with your loved ones.
Just because United States citizens do not have any spiritual life whatsoever, are depressively materialistic and collapse under their fat, does not mean that the whole world is following their example.

McKenzie Wark responds to Le_Candide
posted: 5/31/2006

As the 3rd chapter makes clear (it is called ‘America’) this is a book about a certain world, not exactly coterminous with the United States, where leisure has ceased to exist. There is no longer any distinction between work and play. And hence though looks for a new persona, not the man of leisure, but the gamer.

McKenzie Wark responds to McKenzie Wark
posted: 5/31/2006

… OK, i can finish this now i’ve put the Felix (aka Player 3) to bed…

In 034 i quote Benjamin to the effect that the idler disappears with the abolition of slave labor, and with it the possibilty of the leisure that might give rise to a certain philosophy. But the philosophy of labor (praxis) has also been foreclosed. Its goal was to free human agency from necessity. (In practical terms, to shorten the working day). Only in the age of the Blackberry, the very distinction between work and leisure disappears.

In place of leisure, perhaps then a philosophy of boredom, one of the fundamental ‘attunements’ in Heidegger, and perhaps, even more than anxiety, a way into thinking. If not quite in the way he intended.

Le_Candide responds to McKenzie Wark
posted: 6/1/2006

Allright I will read further, and apologies for the sentence on United States citizens, it was purposedly and stupidly made to provoke, and not very intelligent! (I was in a terrible mood).

posted: 7/31/2006

With your train of thought approach, you’ve got the reader looking forward…and yet it’s disturbing to see that Schopenhauer ‘writes’: if you’re interested in sounding more authentic than God, then: “…Schopenhauer wrote:”

McKenzie Wark responds to June Edvenson
posted: 8/13/2006

There will always be a Schopenhauer, and hence he always ‘writes’.

posted: 2/13/2007

“The reserve armies of the bored zombie earth, fiddling with their cellphones, checking their watches. Bordem is the meter of history.”

I love that you have a chapter on boredom. We can all relate to boredom.It is an interesting “out of the box” way of looking at the habits of our daily modern life.
Oh theres gotta be more to life than just holding on. Great peice of work !

McKenzie Wark responds to Paul Abrahamian
posted: 2/21/2007

Paul: yes, we can allrelate to boredom, but is boredom always the same thing?

Leave a new comment
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
Comments for 154.
Leave a new comment
(All comments will be moderated)
name*:
e-mail*:
website:

(2) Comments for 155.
posted: 7/31/2006

I think this gains impact and clarity by dividing to a new paragraph between ‘good?’ and ‘Boredom…’ Go for it.

posted: 2/16/2007

“Boredom arises out of the absence of necessity, of a yes, a no, a straight line.” What I find interesting about this is how it relates to open-ended and sandbox style games (i.e. Morrowind, Sim City). The most common complaint I’ve noticed in player reviews are that they become ‘bored’ with these types of games because they lack a focus, or don’t make it entirely clear what the necessary triggers/conditions are to advance further in the game. “What displaces boredom is the capacity to act in a way that transforms a situation.” Linear structured games can engage the player more because there is always (in most cases) a clear path one must take, that will ‘transform’ the situation, advancing story — unlocking new stages/abilities/etc. Although this doesn’t mean that the player will never find himself bored at some point, it just may take longer.

Leave a new comment
View all comments in the book
(All comments will be moderated)
scroll for more comments
Recent Comments in Forum
Forum has been discontinued
We are looking into whether it is possible to resurrect the forum, but have had to disable it since moving servers.
Go To Forum