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

[Erin Obodiac]

Thanks, Renate, for the intro, and hello to Empyre subscribers, especially Jason, my co-host for week 4 on Boredom.

I will begin my posts this evening (EST) and continue daily throughout the week as the discussion develops.  Here is my starting point:

Part One of Heidegger's *The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics* analyzes profound boredom (Langeweile) as the fundamental attunement of “our contemporary situation.”  It discusses the fundamental attunement of boredom in relation to temporality and questions of world, finitude, and solitude.  Boredom as that which holds us in limbo and leaves us empty relates immediately and mediately to the passing of time and its dragging.  Heidegger does not relate this situation to consciousness, but as with most of his writings, he relates it to Dasein (there-being).  Nevertheless, Heidegger articulates a specific mode of hearing and seeing connected with boredom, when he writes of “being compelled to listen to what profound boredom gives us to understand” and of “being impelled through the entrancement of time toward the moment of vision as the temporal character of being held in limbo.”  My question here is: does the specific mode of hearing and seeing connected with boredom have a technological analogue?  For instance, is the assemblage of time and vision and hearing a cinematographic technics?  It is here that we might ask about cinematic boredom, both in the sense of the kind of boredom that belongs to cinema and in the sense that boredom is somehow cinematic.  In five posts that follow Heidegger's five chapters on Langeweile, I would like to discuss contemporary conditions of mediality in relation to boredom as the fundamental attunement of “our situation.”  Contemporary conditions of mediality go beyond the cinematic and include not only other forms of machinic vision, machinic hearing, and machinic sensing, but also telepathic, telerobotic, and networked modes of mediality. 

Erin Obodiac