Boredom and the gigantic

Bernstein writes that the 'former Age of Anxiety has given way to the Age of Boredom' (Spacks 1995: 3). Today, we attempt to foreclose or avoid boredom, seeking out technologies that enable us to escape the experience of boredom.

Thus, there is an attempt to consume the boredom away with new gadgets, technologies, devices and distractions, and hence, accelerating levels of consumption become unavoidable. This raises new problems, as Thiele (1997) argues, ‘the specter now looms that technological potential alone is capable of sustaining our interest. Once the human condition is experienced as insufficiently up-to-date to hold our attention, philosophy necessarily gives way to engineering' (Thiele 1997: 516). In a similar vein, Adorno conceptualized boredom as the ‘eversame' (Adorno 1991: 166; 2004: 95). A product of the culture industry in which ‘is the incurable sickness of all entertainment. Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association' (Horkheimer and Adorno 2006: 52).

Heidegger also considered boredom, or what he called ‘deep boredom', a crucial ontological mood that also enabled the questioning of being through anxiety, but which nonetheless had the danger of invoking nihilism. He wrote,

The man of today has no more time for anything, and yet, when he has free time, it immediately becomes too long.

For Heidegger, the fundamental philosophical question of ‘why are there beings rather than nothing' becomes forgotten and ‘the question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not' (Heidegger 1987: 1). Instead, he argued that ‘anxiety is the mood that brings us “face to face with Nothing itself”' Heidegger contrasts this to profound boredom, which ‘draws all things, all men and oneself along with them, together in a queer kind of indifference. This boredom reveals what-is-in-totality.... Yet at the very moment when our moods thus bring us face to face with what-is-in-totality they hide the Nothing we are seeking' (Thiele 1997: 502).

Thus, for Heidegger, the danger of boredom is not that it confronts us with the groundlessness of Being, indeed this, Heidegger argues, is its virtue. Rather, the danger of boredom is that it stifles ontological questioning of this groundlessness in indifference, as explored above within the real-time stream ‘Twitter trance'. The question of technology then is a pressing one, more so in our accelerated real-time streaming world of computational devices, computational categories and philosophy as engineering (Berry 2011). Indeed, we are confronted with a world of streamed things, lists, tuples and sets, which we have to do more than merely describe if we are to engage with it critically.

feared that the mood of boredom would be revealed as humanity's final condition, that the water of philosophic life would become too bland for tongues jaded by the taste of constant innovation. Even more, he worried that the technological suppression of all opportunities for the awakening of boredom would destroy the conditions for philosophic thought and undermine the human capacity to discover a home in the world. (Thiele 1997: 517)

Today, ‘tongues are jaded' not just by contrivances, but by the constant flow of real-time streams of information and data that rush past us in increasing volumes. As we adapt to flowing stream of data we are increasingly living distracted and ‘glitched lives', barely able to keep our heads above the rising rivers of information, or ‘rivers of news' (see Media Hackers 2013). Now, it is increasingly more difficult to ask the questions that philosophers have traditionally asked. Indeed, the temptation is, instead, to list the things that stream past us in the hope that at some future point our lists may perhaps contribute to a project of understanding, or that these lists and litanies offer an aesthetic or entertaining cathartic release. This, it seems to me, is a particular aesthetic experience of the sense of control that technology offers us in ordering through listing, and which is in another sense, a bureaucratic process of classification or filing.

In the world of glass rectangles that define the computational today, we already see signs of the fragmentation and disconnection that seem to be a hallmark of the computational in everyday life. That is not to say people are less connected, as in an instrumental fashion they have never been more connected in history, and with computational devices able to manage their connections for them, it is probable that these ties between people become hardened and less likely to be accidentally broken. Nonetheless, this world of flitting attention and flighty concentration is one that is not only encouraged by the affordances of our current computational devices, but it is also stabilized by them.

It is those in power, and those who align themselves with existing structures of power, who are most often (but not exclusively) served by the advancement of computerization, and who make the fullest use of computers; it is they who endorse most fully the computational rhetoric and the computational beliefs that have become so widespread in our society. (Golumbia 2009: 4)

We should not forget that mass-market personal computational devices have traditionally been sold on a mystique of freedom, liberty and counter-cultural practices in contrast to the centralizing, control and planning discourses that have been used to sell to business. The programming industries, the computer hardware and software companies that increasingly power our economies, are not averse to telling the buyer what she wants to hear in order to move products out of the door. That is not to say that computers have not empowered users, rather ‘what is in question is what power it gives what users, how and why... it is important to articulate the ideological operations of the computational as they come into being, rather than afterwards' (Golumbia 2009: 13).

We now live in a world where the very size of the real-time stream begins to exceed capacities to understand or make any sense of the sheer flow of data, and Twitter which currently handles 250 million tweets per day, or 1.25 billion per week, is a frightening example of this (Totsis 2011). Ways of thinking about the real-time stream as a totality are needed to help think through the implications of this data-rich world and provide a contribution towards a cognitive map. For this reason, I think that Heidegger's notion of the concept of the 'gigantic' (2012) might prove to be useful. For Heidegger, the gigantic represents a new moment whereby the very impossibility of understanding the extremeness of small and large sizes as calculability becomes itself a change in quality. As Heidegger argues,

A sign of this event is that everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics.

And as Livingston (2003) explains, 'at first, the “gigantic” simply meant the unlimited processes of quantification and assumptions of quantifiability that make possible modern technological means of expression and control. But when understood in a broader historical perspective, the ground of the “gigantic” is not just the absence of limits on the process of quantification, but a fundamental aspect or feature of quantity itself' (Livingston 2003: 332-3).

Here, the gigantic is understood as the very possibility of quality being derivational from quantity itself. Thus, the kinds of quantitative possibilities for human existence are measured, calculated, listed, captured, pure data itself as being, 'but as soon as machination is in turn grasped being-historically, the gigantic reveals itself as “something” else. It is no longer the re-presentable objectness of an unlimited quantification but rather quantity as quality. Quality is meant here as the basic character of the quale, of the what, of the ownmost, of be-ing itself' (Heidegger 1999: 94).

The gigantic then becomes the mark of the age of the real-time stream in as much as the gigantic becomes the 'greatness' of this moment. We therefore increasingly use this notion of gigantism as a means of assessing the very importance of things within our everyday experience, not, that is, that the specific value itself has any particular or important meaning, but rather that the sheer impossibility of conceiving of the number (whether large or small) becomes a kind of sublime of unrepresentability. A mere mood or feeling that is associated with the gigantic then becomes something that we routinely consider to be a way to understand meaningful difference. Such that the gigantic becomes a special quality of the quantitative, and 'each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others; it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable' (Appendix 13) (Heidegger 1977: 135). The gigantic therefore means:

1 The gigantism of the slowing down of history (from the staying away of essential decisions all the way to lack of history) in the semblance of speed and steerability of 'historical' [historisch] development and its anticipation.

2 The gigantism of the publicness as summation of everything homogeneous in favour of concealing the destruction and undermining of any passion for essential gathering.

3 The gigantism of the claim to naturalness in the semblance of what is self-evident and 'logical'; the question-worthiness of being is placed totally outside questioning.

4 The gigantism of the diminution of beings in the whole in favour of the semblance of boundless extending of the same by virtue of unconditioned controllability. The single thing that is impossible is the word and representation of 'impossible' (Heidegger 1999: 311; see also Heidegger 2012: 348).

Thus the very fact that we live in a flow of real-time information that exceeds our capacities to understand or follow it - for example, when we have followed enough people such that our stream in Twitter is too fast to understand - is the kind of affect that I think the notion of the gigantic points towards. This is not a feeling of being overwhelmed or being in a situation of losing control, rather, it is a feeling of pure will-to-power, as it were, experiencing the gigantic as a manifestation of oneself. Equally, the flows of data both into and out of one's life then become a marker of one's gigantism, the subjectivity of the stream is constituted by the flow of data through which a moment of curation takes place, but a curation of gigantism, not a reduction as such, but a wholeness or comprehensiveness of coverage. Each of us then becomes his or her own gigantic, in as much as we increasingly generate data flows into and out of the networks of social life mediated through software and code. In the culture of the modern subject who through the logic of representation and computational technologies, ‘which seem to overcome the very limits of space and time, the mystery of transcendence can indeed seem to “appear” only through its sheer absence. Such a culture, then, would appear to be a culture of absolute immanence or even “total presence” a culture de-mystified by a subject who, most notably in the technologies of all-consuming light and image, seems to comprehend all' (Carlson 2003).

This is an illusion of total presence in the real-time stream, presented through such real-time streaming interfaces given by Twitter, Facebook (especially through their Ticker) and related technologies (MacMannus 2011). This is a world in which the sheer gigantic incalculability of the calculable becomes an experience beyond the mere technical process or possibility of data collection, transmission and transformation. Indeed, it becomes the very moment when one is caught within the mystery of the sheer unrepresentability, or perhaps better, incomprehensibility of our own streams of data generated and flowing through these new forms of social network. Made manifest, perhaps though digital technology, but also pointing towards the unencoded that remains outside of these networks, as plasma or the region, and from which this data is drawn.

Heidegger offers the suggestion that within the gigantic is opened a shadow in the form of a moment of possible transcendentalism, perhaps even a new form of sacred, that points to the possible reconfiguration of previous marginal practices or a reconfiguration of things. This, I want to suggest, opens up new possibilities for a human subjectivity that can undertake the practices of listening and harkening to that which lies behind the rushing sound of the real­time streams and their shadows.

By means of this shadow, the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation, and so lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as an historical uniqueness. This shadow also points to something else, which it is denied to us of today to know. But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment... Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that “between” in which he belongs to Being but remains a stranger amid that which is. (Heidegger 1977: 136)

This computational shadow is suggestive in relation to the notion of computationality and the need for a critical reflexivity; particularly in relation to the delightful commodity interfaces of computational technologies and how these relate to changes in the representation of the means of production and the machinery that sustains it. That is how changes in the notion of the commodity and its relation to labour-power are reified in a computational age. But there is little doubt that there ‘is a special relation between the mode of production and mathematics' (Galloway 2010: 11) and as Galloway has argued,

there is something that makes today's mode of production distinct from all the others: the prevalence of software. The economy today is not only driven by software (symbolic machines), in many cases this economy is software, in that it consists of the extraction of value based on the encoding and processing of mathematical information. It's not that software is a kind of motor underpinning the economy, but that, more and more, software is the thing which is directly extracting value. (Galloway 2010: 10)

This is where a new possibility of understanding as response to either as a set of practices or as direct politicization of this softwarization of the economy arises. It is not merely an affective response or a mode of appreciation towards a kind of new media or digital object, although it can include this. Rather, what I have called iteracy has to be reflexive in practice, critical in its stance and able to provide signposts towards uncovering the processes of computational society. Indeed, it is important to avoid a passive approach to the computal, a riparian mode that becomes an all-consuming uncritical boredom (Berry 2011: 144). Rather, and crucially, the constellations of concepts that underlie and sustain computational capitalism need to be rigorously contested and the software that makes it possible hacked, disassembled and unbuilt. As these systems drain us of agency and information, we should seek the means to erect protective structures that provide spaces, if only temporary, from this all-pervading computationism. As suggested already, for now, iteratic practices, like using cryptography, decentralized data systems, distributed logistics and practices and the seizing-up of these systems' operations, might offer some respite but more collective responses will be needed.