Concluding part of my exploration of planet apathy. Part one, a history of boredom, is here, part two, modern boredom and the attention wars, here.
Postmodernity: A Thousand Dead Suns
Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask; do you believe that life will always allow itself to be trifled with; do you believe that one can sneak away just before midnight in order to avoid it? I have seen people in life who have deceived others for such a long time that eventually they are unable to show their true nature. I have seen people who have played hide-and-seek so long that at last in a kind of lunacy they force their secret thoughts on others just as loathsomely as they proudly had concealed them from them earlier. Or can you think of anything more appalling than having it all end with the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you actually became several, just as that unhappy demon became legion, and thus you would have lost what is the most inward and holy in a human being…?
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
The nineteen seventies saw the complete technocratic detachment of objective reality from subjective experience. This psychological-cultural cataclysm, both facilitated and motivated by the technological system, manifested as four interlinking and mutually reinforcing crises, the consequence of which was the complete breakdown of society, along with the minds which once comprised it.
[Economic] financialisation. The dominance of financial markets, institutions, and speculative financial activities over the production and exchange of tangible goods and services.
[Political] neoliberalism. A massive expansion of elite power by deregulating the market, privatising the state and dismantling the working class; by offshoring production and ‘inshoring’ immigrant labour.
[Social] virtualisation. The complete exposure of a now manageable and marketable self, along with the transfer of all its social interactions, onto an intensely surveilled discarnate ‘platform’.
[Cultural] postmodernism. The liquidation of all cultural boundaries (between man and woman, meaning and meaninglessness, beauty and ugliness, the private and the public, and so on).
The postmodern condition, which both justifies and expresses financialisation, neoliberalism and virtualisation, is a state so boring that death, or living death, becomes preferable. It comprises a few islands of rootless, pornographic, titillation, called ‘fun’, hovering above a heat-dead ocean of non-time. For hundreds of millions of Pomotroids, waking life means swimming across a poisonous, plastic-choked — and unbearably tedious — marine desert in order to get to the next fix, the next game, the next wank, the next session, or the next prayer. In the meantime we are hyper-bored; in our offices, in our factories, in our waiting rooms, on our social media feeds and at every tedious station on the pleasureless obstacle course we call ‘the real world’. And yet we do not realise the existential horror that lies beneath this hyper-boredom, because hyper-stimulating engines of distraction pull us away from the void. Only when these diversions are unavailable or in a moment of clarity, when we rise above ourselves and see the world as it really is, do we realise how monstrously bored we actually are and have always been. As if our whole lives have been spent on an automated help line.1
The torment and tedium of postmodernism is that relaxed consciousness has been completely overwhelmed by slit-thin hyper-attention, which must be perpetually ‘engaged’ on the galaxy of unrelated things, including the thing of my self, that such maniacal focus brings into being. The postmodern subject has to be hyper-attentive to all the data points flowing in from finance apps, health apps, productivity apps, to every last calorie, vitamin and particle of microplastic which passes our lips, to a ceaseless stream of facts, images and symbols, floating across the screen of the mind, or beamed onto the visual cortex, without having to go via anything as silly and out of date as a ‘real world’. This compulsive activity completely ruptures the split between my subjective self here, and the objective world there, which then floats away from me into a ‘zone of anaesthesia’ that has expanded to take in the entire universe.
But although hyper-attention to a world reduced to data is certainly forced upon us, it is also compulsively handed over. Man embraces his fractured alienation, loves and defends it as an extension of his own being — which it is. The atomised self doesn’t merely take on its closely-focused pleasures and priorities, it becomes them, such that freedom from hyper-attention becomes impossible to even imagine, much less realise. This isn’t to say that release from the pain of having to constantly focus isn’t a driving force in the lives of Postmodernites. Indeed, taking advantage of this need is the purpose of the cultural industry which dangles fame, success, power and stimulation — in the form of cultural heroes, spectacular commodities, sporting triumph, blissful holidays and the like — before atomised man, simultaneously motivating him to continue producing and consuming, while at the same time consoling him for his misery. Buddhism, Stoicism, Christianity and the various boutique philosophies of the modern, ‘mindful’, middle-class, all late-capitalist religions of attention, offer the same benefits, enabling professionals to concentrate, tightly focus on what would otherwise bore them,2 while, at the same time, releasing them from the never-ending bourgeois anxiety3 of having to do so.
But enlightenment never comes, nor do dreams of fame and fortune materialise. No handsome prince lifts Cinderella from her drudgery, no lottery win frees the office worker from his misery, no socialist utopia dawns on the capitalist dark, no place, restlessly sought by the postmodern hyper-tourist, ever appears.4 Some, realising this, give up and waste away, some valiantly keep on shovelling commodities down their throat until they expire, others transplant their ambitions onto their children who are then crushed or deformed by the weight of them, a lucky few actually achieve their goals and win one of the Great Gold Medals that the spectacle dangles before our eyes, only to find, like Apollo, that Daphne has turned into a laurel wreath, the ancient Greek symbol of ephemeral success and disappointment. ‘One thirsts for novelties, unknown ecstasies, nameless sensations, but as soon as they are known, they lose their savour.’5
The shattered things of postmodernity that we must hyper-focus on do not just exist in space but in time, which does not move as it once did, flowing with its own natural life, directly experienced from within, but now comes to the concentrating mind as a series of rigidly demarcated intervals enforced from without. This cuts consciousness off even more completely from direct experience, which becomes both hollow and meaningless, and at the same time intensely ‘full’ or ‘meaningful’ in that each moment is a definite something which I must focus on and manage in some way, by liking or disliking, filtering or editing, dragging it into the correct folder, converting it into another format, and so on and so forth. This is simulated world time, or dead unitime, in which the possibility of consciously experienced, unmediated living time, whole and rich with its own quality, becomes impossible.
One can no longer live different kinds of time, cold, dripping Tuesday afternoon time, sweaty, summer, dried-grass, midnight time, unstructured rolling round on the floor idle time, furiously productive hacking at a trench time, primaeval detonations of sex-glory jungle time, floating devotional spring-blossom time, bittersweet winter beach-combing time… This constellation of unique moments, each rich with its own indivisible quality, collapses into a single, uniform, characterless and impossible to ignore time-paste, each squeezed spoonful of which demands total, psychotic hyper-attention. The consumer of packaged time-units must always be ready to fulfil the instantaneous demands of the system, to push the button, fill in the cell, answer the email, each operation being one of billions of similar such reactions performed in a timeless, spaceless, characterless pastiche of the heavenly present that returns, if it does, as mere memory, never as the reverie of characterful recollection.
Without the experience of qualitative time man becomes unconscious, a zombie. Bodiless fusion with a hypermodulated, hypersynchronised series of quantitative data-points forever divides the satchel of impressions I call my ‘self’, here from a spectacular dreamland of uniform things and moments there, which becomes absolutely alien and thus, hyper-boring. This leads to a tragic lack of incarnate passion which leads in turn to indecision, wasted libido, perversion, docility and cowardliness. Without the passion of conscious life burning in the body, it becomes impossible to consciously act on one’s own initiative. The self becomes passive before the unfathomable force of the system, leading to, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, ‘the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history.’6 The recent ‘pandemic’ was, as Agamben also noted, ample demonstration of this.