[-empyre-] time and desire

[James Joseph Hodge]

Hello to all!


Along with Gordon Calleja I'll be guest moderator for this week's discussion of design and compulsion.


I'm interested in a few different aspects of Patrick's chosen theme of design and compulsion, and I'd like to suggest we concentrate a bit on time and the experience of temporality a bit more. Especially in terms of how the temporality of an "exhorbitant desire" instantiated by porn viewing and gambling, but also very ordinary, everyday forms of mediated experience. Here's my question:


why do we take out our phones so often? Popular discourse often refers to "smartphone addictions." So there's one starting point.


On first blush, checking a phone doesn't seem in line with "exorbitant forms of desire" like porn viewing and gambling, and yet we discuss our smartphone use in the idioms of compulsion and addiction. What are we addicted to exactly? The easy answer (and not an incorrect one, I believe) is "connection." More fundamentally, I want to suggest that checking our phones has to do with a desire to temporalize, to be in time with a host of things: friends, family, events, institutions, geographic areas, countries, bots, stocks, etc. Much here might be said about the vicissitudes of the experience of time in digital media and network cultures. But I want to suggest that there remains much to be said about the desire, the need, the compulsion to feel in time in a way that networks afford and simultaneously render impossible. Like gambling or porn viewing, it's not about perfect co-synchronicity or achievement but rather gleaning something of the lower level libidinal pleasures not entirely siphoned off by network capitalism.


I'm tempted to say more but I hope this will start something building off the previous threads on compulsion and design.


All best, Jim Hodge






James J. Hodge
Assistant Professor
Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
Department of English
Northwestern University
University Hall 215
1897 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208-2240
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