Mosurinjohn Sharday C 20150
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BOREDOM, OVERLOAD, AND THE CRISIS OF MEANING IN LATE MODERN TEMPORALITY by Sharday Catherine Mosurinjohn A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (June, 2015) Copyright © Sharday Catherine Mosurinjohn, 2015 Abstract Boredom, in its blankness, has been both a canvas and a subject for modern artists and intellectuals. Whereas those in the early and mid-twentieth century theorized and aesthetically reencountered the conditions of boredom as a wasteland, boredom appears in the work of today as impossibly dense. Boredom in the semiocapitalist information age only remains blank insofar as it is full to the brim with information of inscrutable complexity and choices without real alternatives. Because boredom is fundamentally an experience of time distorted and emptied of meaning, developing this theory of boredom sustains a critical reflection on the temporality of contemporary everyday life. My approach is through vignettes of communication practices that are attempts at meaning-making and modulating time, but are also, in some sense, boring. After reviewing key literature on boredom pre- and post-digital revolution, I first turn to a consideration of texting. While texting is usually derided as trivial and time-wasting, I consider it as habitual in a compulsive, physical sense, but also ritual, in the sense of something done in a patterned way to affirm a bond. The experience of repeated sending and receiving is analyzed as an experience of accelerating or decelerating interpersonal temporalities. In the next chapter, I follow the shape of communication paths through the network and arrive at an exploration of line-making itself. Treating the line as a heuristic device, I consider the line as a cipher of boredom and the networked line, specifically, as an icon of late modernity. Chapter four deals with the use of lines and linearity in conceptual art and writing that explores boredom as a counter-spectacle; that is, as both a symptom of info- and entertainment culture and as a state from which it can be understood. I posit this work as an other of choice and information overload. Having used these vignettes to develop the idea of a uniquely late modern boredom of overload, I conclude that any confrontation with the twenty-first-century politics of information on the grounds of such ii practices as surveillance or semiocapitalism, is incomplete without an understanding of this boredom as a public affect. iii Acknowledgements I extend sincere thanks: To my supervisor Prof. Gary Kibbins, for being game. I couldn’t have done this without you and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Your brilliance, guidance, and friendship over these years have been such an unexpected gift. To the rest of my committee, Dr. Asha Varadharajan, Dr. Allison Morehead, Dr. Martin Hand, and Dr. Julian Jason Haladyn for taking on an unconventional project in an “undisciplined” field. I count myself lucky to have the support of people with your varied expertise and perspectives. To Dr. Michael Gardiner, Dr. Peter Toohey, Jonathan Stein, and Derek Oxley for reading and listening to portions of this work and giving generous feedback. To administrators, friends, and colleagues in the Cultural Studies program for dedicating so much of yourselves to keeping it alive and thriving, and especially to the indispensable Ms. Danielle Gugler. To those elsewhere on campus for the opportunities and inspiration you’ve given me. I have been fortunate to be able to work in diverse research, teaching, and service capacities with Dr. Joshua Mozersky, Dr. Laura Murray, Dr. Lynda Jessup, Dr. Jackie Davies, Dr. Richard Ascough, Dr. Mari Retheyli, Dr. Richard Day, and Ms. Colette Steer, who has done extraordinary things to enrich my experience of being part of the Queen’s community. To my mother, Paula Perdue, whose sole response to my every effort has been nothing but pride. Though I may have sometimes doubted the purpose of my work (susceptible to boredom as I am), because of you I never once doubted my ability to do it. To Nathan Townend, whose influence is so profound as to be almost retroactive. And to Dustin Washburn, who fascinates me, always. iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1 Introduction: Boredom, Choice, and Time ...................................................................... 1 1.1 Methodology and Rationale ................................................................................................... 6 1.2 Boredom ................................................................................................................................. 9 1.2.1 Heidegger: Boredom as the Prevailing Mood of Modernity ........................................ 12 1.2.2 Lefebvre and Benjamin: Relaxed Boredom and Busy Boredom ................................... 16 1.2.3 Critiques: Maybe Even Profound Boredom is Still Pretty Ordinary ............................ 19 1.2.4 Has Boredom Changed in the Twenty-First Century?: The Effects of Speed on a Slow Mood ...................................................................................................................................... 24 1.3 Choice .................................................................................................................................. 32 1.4 Chapter Outline .................................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 2 In and Out of Synch with Meaning: Boredom and Texting .......................................... 45 2.1 Idle Hands, Idle Minds ......................................................................................................... 48 2.2 Fed Up, Sick of It, and Existentially Nauseous: A Brief Natural History of Boredom as a Social Adaptation ....................................................................................................................... 51 2.3 Culturally Specific Boredoms: Overload in Information Society ........................................ 53 2.4 Texting As Embodied Habit and Social Ritual .................................................................... 61 2.4.1 Fast Friends: Asynchronicity and Time-Space Distanciation ...................................... 62 2.4.2 Distance Does Make the Heart Grow Fonder: Patterns of Absence, Presence, and Desire in Texting .................................................................................................................... 65 2.4.3 You Can Never Have Too Many Friends: Habitual Social Networking ....................... 66 2.5 Composure in/of the Habritual Message .............................................................................. 69 2.6 Waiting is the Hardest Part: Agency, Anxiety, and Reciprocity in Text Messaging ........... 70 2.7 The Temporality of the Archive ........................................................................................... 75 2.8 Coda: This Message Will Self-Destruct ............................................................................... 78 Chapter 3 On Line: Pursuing Temporal-Affective Paths in Network Society through the Poetics of the Line ...................................................................................................................................... 84 3.1 Tracing a Lineage: Straight, Fragmented, and Networked Lines ........................................ 85 v 3.2 Form and Function ............................................................................................................... 93 3.3 Delineating Virtual and Social Space .................................................................................. 96 3.4 Tropes of Line, Time, and Mind .......................................................................................... 99 Chapter 4 Making More Boring Art: Conceptual Drawing and Writing as an Other of Information Overload ....................................................................................................................................... 105 4.1 “All Form Being Information Leasing Matter”: Choice and Meaning in Conceptual Drawing .................................................................................................................................... 116 4.2 Conceptual Writing in a Postmedium Condition ............................................................... 129 4.3 Dull Work and Some Play .................................................................................................. 132 4.4 The Pale King ..................................................................................................................... 148 Chapter 5 After Now: Public Affects, Aesthetics, and Boredom as a Genre of the Present ........ 159 5.1 Review and Further Reflections ......................................................................................... 160 5.1.1 Chapter Summaries ..................................................................................................... 165 5.2 Conclusions and Future Directions ...................................................................................