WASTING TIME
(mining boredom, cultivating distraction, idling, killing time)
NEW CIRCADIA
“…All this only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work…”
In Praise of Idleness, and other essays, Bertrand Russell, 1935
“....despite our tendency to use “idle” as a pejorative meaning “lazy” or “useless,” the idler is neither…”
The Idler’s Glossary, Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell, 2008
“...Boredom is a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream…”
The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin, 1927-40
Glemis: Do you mean people who don’t like your films or are bored by them just aren’t working hard enough?
Warhol: I don’t know. But it’s a lot of fun.
Andy Warhol in Conversation with Joseph Glemis, 1969
In the displacement of natural solar time, the nineteenth-century standardization of time through the division of the world into time zones, gave new force to the age-old hostility toward idleness. Wasted time was unproductive time. An idle person was no better than an idle machine. The harbinger of standardized time supplanting natural or “deep time” was the construction of the railroad. In cutting through swaths of rock formations to lay down track, the railroad made deep time visible by exposing a geological history of sedimentation to public viewing. Ironically, it was also the railroad industry’s implementation of standardized time for the purposes of establishing reliable and efficient timetables that served as the primary means of mobility for an increasing pool of non-working as well as transient labor - tramps, hobos, and bums. Idleness and efficiency, wasted time and productive time became mutually beneficial rather than adversarial. The New Circadia invites participants to engage in productive forms of idleness.
EVENTS
Film Screening, Friday, April 3
Playtime (1967)
Monsieur Hulot wanders through a surrealistic version of mid-20th-century Paris in this comedic masterpiece by one of France's most renowned filmmakers.
Director: Jacques Tati, 2hr. 35min.
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
An absurdist buddy comedy with a minimalist plot. From the director of Broken Flowers and Coffee and Cigarettes.
Director: Jim Jarmusch, 1hr. 29min.
Lecture, Tuesday, February 25
Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface
with Mark Kingwell
An urgent, timely, and political analysis of the boredom that dominates our everyday immersion in distracting technologies.
Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for.
Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms.
Written in accessible language that references both classical philosophers and contemporary critics, Wish I Were Here turns to philosophy for a cure to the widespread unease that something is amiss in modern waking life.
