[-empyre-] All call: subscribers interested in Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

"We seems to live in a Big Brothers house where our acts are monitored by
thousand devices, drones, taped phones, hidden mics, candy cams...
I want to have boredom as a choice not as a punishment." Ana

"I think this was what I was trying to suggest when I wrote of boredom as a
form of excess value." Simon

Ana, Simon, there is social prison (a Panopticon) and there is literal one
(the one Ana experienced). Are they the same thing?

I was thinking of an inmate, whose fate already determined, who will spend
the rest of his life in solitary confinement with basically no human
contact. Now obviously he has an excess, but it is a negative value. His
boredom would be near (though in extreme form) to what we mean by the word.

Then, there is someone in jail waiting for interrogation. That person also
will experience excess, but it is not boredom. It may be fear or anxiety.
So, Simon, I do not quite understand what you mean by "excess of value"?

Then, in the prison depicted by Ana, a panocticon --a condition quite close
to our condition in the United States-- its effect, it seems to me, is the
opposite of excess. It is a flattening of feeling. Panocticons of that kind
function best when feelings are flattened (Simon, I think that's what you
mean by "excess of value"). Emotional "excesses" are channeled--to sports
events (circuses), new applications, watches, gizmos ("*disruptive*
economic acts" whose main function is efficiency).

In modern capitalist societies, I think, efficiency both creates boredom,
and channels it as "disruptions," in a vicious desperate cycle. In its
extreme form, in such a society that Ana describes, efficiency is what
boredom is. It creates the "excess" (as negative value) that Simon is
suggesting.

Capitalist efficiency is also a destroyer of labor (as economists are
beginning to acknowledge). It increases poverty, a condition which has its
own very different concept of boredom: an surplus of time due to a loss of
job, countered by anxieties about rent or the next meal.

Ciao,
Murat

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 7:43 PM, Simon Biggs <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> boredom as a choice not as a punishment
>
>
> I think this was what I was trying to suggest when I wrote of boredom as a
> form of excess value. Of course that is boredom for the privileged. But
> there is also the boredom that is imposed - the boredom of deprivation or
> oppression.
>
> But are these the same? We might use the same word for these conditions
> but this could be just lazy semantics.
>
> best
>
> Simon
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> @_simonbiggs_
>
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk
> http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs
>
> simon.biggs at unisa.edu.au
> Professor of Art, University of South Australia
> http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=simon.biggs
>
> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk
> Honorary Professor, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
>
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=182&cw_xml=profile.php
>
> On 19 May 2015, at 03:56, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Subject: boredom as a feeling of emtpiness...
> To continue adding new nuances to the discussion about boredom I wonder if
> boredom is not as well a feeling of emptiness. We try to fill the vaccum of
> our lives adding things to entertain us. Literature is now based on
> entertainment, once in a time literature used to be challenging, to provoke
> reaction in the reader, to inspire new thoughts to confront the reader with
> feelings and experiences from other people like himself or herself.
> We have all those reality shows making us to believe reality is twelve ppl
> in a house being filmed when they take showers when they eat when they
> sleep when they argue.
> We seems to live in a Big Brothers house where our acts are monitored by
> thousand devices, drones, taped phones, hidden mics, candy cams...
> I want to have boredom as a choice not as a punishment.
> Ana
>
>
>
>
> --
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>
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>
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> — Leonardo da Vinci
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