event mechanics

The first post in a series on The Affective Cycle of Popular Culture on Boredom.

General disclaimer: It is the basis for a lecture on the topic. It is note-based without substantial examples and without any context-setting work for the readings (e.g. who is Kracauer and what was the intellectual context of his article?).

The two main readings for this fortnight are Siegfried Kracauer’s 1924 article “Boredom” espousing a ‘radical boredom’ and Paul Corrigan’s 1975 chapter in Resistance Through Rituals “Doing Nothing”.

Siegfried Kracauer’s 1924 “Boredom”
Kracauer is concerned that “the world makes sure that one does not find oneself”:

[O]ne’s spirit — which is no longer one’s own — roams endlessly out of night and into the night. If only it were allowed to disappear! But, like Pegasus on a carousel, this spirit must run in circles and may never tire of praising to high heaven the glory of a liqueur and the merits of the best five-cent cigarette. Some sort of magic spurs the spirit relentlessly amid the thousand electric bulbs, out of which it constitutes and reconstitutes itself into glittering sentences.

Kracauer raises the brief examples of the movie theater and radio as examples of activities whereby participants are occupied, but do not occupy their own will. “Silent and lifeless, people sit side by side as if their souls were wondering about far away. But these souls are not wandering according to their own preference; they are badgered by the news hounds, and soon no one can tell anymore who is the hunter and who is the hunted.”

Kracauer’s logic is thus: If you find yourself the object of boredom, forever trying to occupy yourself with something or another, to ward off boredom, then you are the subject of interests that are not your own. This is not an ideological struggle, although it may be expressed as such, it is primarily an affective struggle over one’s interest.

The only proper response then is to welcome boredom through an act of patience, “the sort of boredom specific to legitimate boredom”. Then, Kracauer argues, “one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly”. The world is transformed and you begin to notice that the landscape is populated in ways that you had not previously perceived. As a result your soul swells with a “great passion”.
Kant would’ve called this a mode of the aesthetic sublime and a product of supreme disinterested interest; an affect when joined with the idea of the good, or ‘enthusiasm’.

Paul Corrigan’s 1975 “Doing Nothing”
Corrigan’s chapter in Resistance through Rituals begins with a different set of problematics. During his fieldwork he discovered that the principle activity of ‘British subculture’ is in fact ‘doing nothing’. There are a number of components of “doing nothing”:

1) Talking. Firstly, the most common form of talking is the story. Stories are recounted following one of Sartre’s definitions of ‘adventure’ (from Nausea), where an adventure is defined not merely by the randomness of events or the level of excitement induced by participation in particular activities, no the criterion of adventure is that you do something worthy of talking about as a story afterwards. Most consumers are convinced that the world is full of such ‘adventures’; hence with the advent of social media such ‘talking’ has migrated online and we are inundated with regular people offering a running commentary on their everyday lives.

Secondly, Corrigan argues, the purpose of the talking is not so much to communicate, but to communicate the experience of talking. It is the act of telling the story that is important, not the subject of the story (which of course matters, but it is secondary). In Theodor Adorno’s infamous essay about the Culture Industry in which he attacks Jazz, he also notes a similar shared dimension of consumption that was not so much about being linked to a specific commodity, but more about ‘sharing good times’. The burden of exchanged-based valorisation versus aesthetic efficacy implicit in his infamous critique of commercial jazz – that “it is fine for dancing and dreadful for listening” – needs to be inverted by combining it with another of his observations in the same essay. He writes that in “Amercian conventional speech, having a good time means being present at the enjoyment of others, which in its turn has as its only content being present”. Adorno acknowledges, albeit in a dismissive fashion, the necessary role of affect in its movement across the bodies of others as being colloquially realised as ‘having a good time’. The more interesting observation is the relation of alterity implicit in the experience of a ‘good time’, that is being present at the enjoyment of others.

To shift registers from the interesting to the critical, the point is that through story telling the people taking part of the story telling event experience a sense of belonging; they were within this virtuosic dimension of the story telling and witnessed this virtuosic dimension mediated through the reactions and implication of other bodies in the event. It is what Brian Massumi calls becoming-together.

Notice how there does not have to be a commodity present here? One of the current functions of the marketing industry is to implicate commodities in the everyday adventures of consumers so consumers will tell stories about them, ie Word of Mouth advertising.

2) Weird Ideas. That major component of ‘doing nothing’, Corrigan (following his research subjects) calls ‘weird ideas’:

It is the ‘weird idea’ that represents the major something in ‘doing nothing’. In fighting boredom the kids do not choose the street as a wonderfully lively place, rather they look on it as the place where there is the most chance that something will happen. […] The weird ideas then are born out of boredom and the expectation of future and continuing boredom, and this affects the sort of weird ideas they are. A good idea must contain the seeds of continuing change as well as excitement and involvement.

Like Adorno’s consumers who ‘have a good time’ by ‘being present at the enjoyment of others’, Corrigan’s working class kids told stories to pass the time. Time, when “doing nothing”, is a burden as it populated with the expectation of future and continuing boredom. They go out looking for interesting things to occur — “we are not talking about boys going out on a Saturday night looking for milk bottles to smash, rather it is a purely interesting thing that occurs.” What is the relation then between interest/interesting things and the qualitative dimension of time? How interested do you have to be to have a good time? Or is it simply a case of being able to experience another person’s interest that makes the time good?

For Corrigan’s working class kids the alternative to ‘doing nothing’ in the street is staying at home with “Mum and Dad in the front room” or going to a venue like the Youth Club. In other words, activities that are sanctioned as morally appropriate by adults. Unlike Kracauer’s proto-consumers of the culture industry, Corrigan’s working class kids do not have access to cultural commodities that would be of interest to them. Undoubtedly, if there were interesting things to do then kids would not be hanging out in the streets. And yet, they do, because there is nothing else. They are not constrained by a cultural landscape saturated by advertising, which sends consumers off on a maze constructed by the expectations of others’ enjoyment; rather, their maze is overdetermined by their material conditions of existence.

I would like to teach a course called the “The Affective Cycle of Popular Culture”. Most courses on popular culture are organised around a particular segment of popular culture, such as an industry or particular form of cultural commodity, and then the cultural dimensions of this industry or cultural commodity. I would prefer to follow the ebbs and flows of engagement and disengagement of consumer subjectivity and the structural conditions that coalesce to produce such affective effects.

I am aiming to write a substantial blog post on each of the below topics, hopefully once per fortnight. The posts will not be complete lectures, for example I will not engage with any substantial examples, but they should communicate the substantial points for the given fortnight.

Boredom 1 February, 2011
I engage with Siegfried Kracauer’s 1924 article “Boredom” and Paul Corrigan’s 1975 chapter in Resistance Through Rituals “Doing Nothing”.

Distracting Interests (TBA)

Anxiety and Depression (TBA)

Enthusiasm (TBA)

Anticipation (TBA)

Nostalgia (TBA)

Events and Non-Events (TBA)

Differential Repetition (TBA)

Loyalty (TBA)

Politics (TBA)

Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it’s an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It’s not going to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won’t even rock gently in the breeze. It’s just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that. If it was on television, they’d at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you’d immediately switch over. But instead, because you’ve got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone’s going to think you’re a philistine. The same principle applies in art galleries and museums. They’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.

Even though it is depressing to watch, I like the TV show Nathan Barley, co-created as an adaptation from a a fake TV guide listing (TV Go Home) for a fake TV show called Cunt. (Here is a link to one of my more infamous blog posts, it is probably NWS if you live behind a coarse language firewall, but if you did, then why are you reading my blog?:)

The above block quote comes from the regular Guardian column of one of the co-creators of Nathan Barley and TV Go Home, Charlie Brooker. I was introduced to Charlie Brooker’s column by a friend with whom I share many similar tastes in popular culture consumption. Brooker is a funny bastard, I certainly grant him that. His column from the 22 June 2009 is about having an ‘interest’ (ie hobby) and the relation between this ‘interest’ and the practices of ‘interested’ people and the way Brooker has always turned his ‘interest’ into a job.

Brooker’s column makes fun of what he perceives to be the contemplative mode of engagement expressed through the practices of visitors to archaeological ruins as they pause and consider a broken pot. There is a rhythm to this practice, of walking, having one’s interest caught, gazing upon this object of interest and all the while contemplating something about it. The capacity to contemplate an object reminds me of the way Bourdieu wrote about the capacity of certain upper-class consumers of cultural artefacts. There is a pleasure in the nitty gritty of seeking these objects out, but the point is to index their particular significance. (See Hilary Geoghegan’s essay in the ‘Enthuse‘ special eissue of M/C Journal on Being Enthusiastic about Industrial Archaeology.) To realise their significance requires an informal (for amateurs) or formal (for scholars or professionals) inculcuration of these practices into the enthusiast habitus. At stake is a subcultural assessment of beauty. For Brooker there is no utility in a this kind of Kantian reflection on the ‘beauty’ of the broken pot. The Bourdieuian would simply retort Brooker is not properly equipped to contemplate the broken pot’s beauty nor have the cultural capital to realise its significance.

I am not a Bourdieuian, however. I appreciate Bourdieu’s work and what he has given to the social sciences. I prefer to take another position, one that incorporates what, following Deleuze, is the virtual dimension of the cracked pot. Think about an amatuer archeologist’s practice. They come across several if not dozens of such artefacts similar to the cracked pot in their leisure-time labour. The great joy of such amateurs, just as it is for any subcultural practice organised around the indexing and cataloguing of significant cultural artefacts, is when something that might be an artefact does not fit into the schema of the established typology.

Bourdieu went to great pains to point out the class bias in Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgement. But what if Bourdieu was wrong to focus on aesthetic judgement and instead should have engaged with Kant’s notion of enthusiasm to describe the cultural practices of his research subjects? Participating in a cultural formation does not only require a cultural competence, it also requires one to be mobilised. The mobilisation was assumed in Bourdieu’s account; it is a variable he took out of his analysis of formations of cultural consumption and their intersection with class-based social stratifcations. Surely everyone has met people who belong to a particular social milieu but who choose not to particpate in the practices of cultural consumption ‘expected’ of such a social positioning?

The amateur archeologists as well as many other enthusiasts are forced to use their respective powers of imagination. The broken pot has a biography, its surface and its cracks are traces of events that have been inscribed upon it. Part of the work of the enthusiast is to decipher these material signs of its biography. For example, enthusiasts in modified-car culure can ‘read’ the material signs of a car and reconstruct the ‘amount of work that has gone into it’, which would be similar to an archeologist exclaiming to how much ‘history’ is present. ‘Amount’ here is quantitative but it is also qualitative, the biography (work/history, i.e. active/passive inculcation of events) is an index of enthusiasm, deciphered from the material signs of the object’s biography and immanently valorised within the practice of contemplating the object.

Charlie Booker seems to be mobilised by the challenge of cultural critique of those practices that he deems boring (amateur archeologists). It is an unnerving practice to simply pour scorn on other peoples’ enthusiasms and I don’t care much for it. Maybe there is some inverse cultural cringe here, but I think people should be allowed the dignity of pursuing their collective enthusiasms. For some it is the only thing they have for warding off a brutal and nihilistic ennui. Booker, and many other people I have met of my generation who are as cool as fuck, is alienated from his own enthusiasm and seems to get enthusiastic about pointing out the ‘absurdities’ of another’s enthusiasm.

Trying to be lazy these last two days. It is hard work being lazy. I snuck in some Kant and administrative work. I work tomorrow.

Wrote a bad poem, lol!

Inhalation:
Sweetest sweet ass poison,
Burns, relieves, focuses.
Well, exhale,
And we had the ciggies, at least.