Dividing time,or love’s labour’s lost . . .

Authors of four studies in this issue, inspired and collected by Mark Davis, embark on a journey of exploration and discovery. What they explore is the great unknown: the world smarting under merciless pressures of ‘hurried life’ (Steven Bertman), the ‘tyranny of the moment’ (Thomas Hylland Eriksen), ‘pointillist time’ (Michel Maffesoli) or ‘nowist culture’ – all of them inhibiting the temptation to or the plausibility of slowing down and pausing for reflection: those necessary conditions of understanding the world which we all inhabit and shape while being shaped by it, albeit only beginning to map and comprehend.

That world which the four authors set out to render intelligible to us is split into two universes. In itself, such a split is anything but a novelty. As far as our collective memory can delve into the past, our ancestors had to reconcile two or more sharply different, all too often contradictory and incompatible, sets of principles, norms and behavioural patterns around which their lives were wrapped. Most of the lines dividing the world in which they lived (for instance border or frontlines that separated the sacred from the mundane, public from private, or working time from the time of leisure) have been by now blurred and all but effaced – or at least relegated from the premier league of concerns to the murky and seldom if at all visited expanses of irrelevancy. In the order of importance measured by the extent of nuisance they provoke, all such past splits have been by now left behind by another division: one between online and offline segments of the world we currently inhabit. It is tempting to think of it as the ‘meta-division’: the paramount, dominant division, subordinating the rest of extant dividing lines, re-shaping them, rearranging and re-classifying.

The appearance and spectacular career of the new dominant division of the Lebenswelt would not be of course plausible (or indeed thinkable) without the advent and spread of digital technology; mistaking them, however, for the effect of that technology would be tantamount to putting a cart before the horse. The rise of a new dominant division was no doubt aided and abetted by the presence and easy availability of adequate technological media, but its roots are sunk deeply in the advances made by the ‘modern way of life’ or the ‘modern spirit’ in the centuries preceding their invention. The ‘modern project’ (never, to be sure, articulated in full, codified and recorded, though no less imperative for that reason and losing nothing of its motivational powers) was aimed from the start at making human life more comfortable and so more enjoyable for its practitioners; the online world is just the latest milestone on the path blazed throughout modern history.

One way of recounting history of the modern era is to narrate it as the story of war declared on all and any discomfort, inconvenience or displeasure. The present-day massive (even if part-time and intermittent) emigration from the offline world to the freshly discovered (or construed) online lands might well be recorded in that story as the most decisive of its battles thus far; the battle currently waged was, after all, launched and continues to be fought on the field of inter-human relations, heretofore a territory most resistant and defiant to all attempts to flatten and smooth its rugged and bumpy roads and to straighten its twisted passages, while staunchly defying all efforts to cleanse it of traps and ambushes with which it is spattered in its offline rendition – and so to make it all in all negotiable without heavy strain and with no need for tiresome efforts and daunting risks. This battle promises, if won, to render the cumbersome and unwieldy tasks of tying and breaking human bonds, together with the commitments and obligations they imply, childishly easy: well-nigh effortless, trouble free and free of worries. If won by the forces presently on the offensive, the current battle may be also followed by the conquest and annexation of the other, offline half of the lived world, and consequently its ‘acculturation’: adoption of cognitive frames, predispositions, value hierarchy and behavioural patterns developed and entrenched in the online half.

Four essays published in this issue of Thesis Eleven focus on time – only one dimension of the multifaceted transformation; the choice of that dimension is, however, singularly felicitous, as the changing role and perception of time can serve as a paradigmatic feature of the ongoing cultural revolution brought about by dividing the lived world in two. In the online world, time is stretched – a capacity all but unattainable, or at least extremely difficult to achieve, in the offline half of life. And it is stretched simultaneously in two ways: tasks undertaken require less time to fulfil, and because of the far-reaching reduction of their complexity, as well as of the depth and intensity of required engagement (‘surfing’ calls for considerable less time and effort than ‘examining’, let alone ‘fathoming’), several tasks can be tackled in parallel in the same time span. Time deficit, arguably the most vexing of the many inconveniences and discomforts notorious in the handling of offline tasks, has been thereby significantly reduced; more significantly yet, apparently realistic and believed to be effective ways and means of further time-expanding, and so also of raising the level of comfort and putting paid to yet more annoyances, have been put temptingly within reach. True, the already aroused and continually beefed up expectations tend to run well ahead of the actually attained results, and the side effect of acceleration is a widely noted impatience of the online regular users and the all-too-visible diminishing of their tolerance to all and any delay, deferment or procrastination, in online activities yet more acute and annoying than in the offline life.

Shrinking of such tolerance rebounds as a diminishing readiness for lengthy pursuit of distant goals together with the mental and emotional aptitude to persist in effort, as well as the falling capacity of undertaking tasks known to require a protracted effort while promising no instant effects, or as a tendency to abandon such tasks well before the effects have had time to crystallize. Unpleasant experiences of this kind, however frequent, do not as a rule result in more realistic expectations or in mitigation of impatience; successive frustrations of expectations tend to be recycled (paradoxically, though not without keen and insistent help from designers, producers and sellers of the digital gear) into a further reduction of patience and demand for yet quicker and more expedient, obedient and obliging gadgets.

‘The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne’, suggested Jonathan Franzen in a speech delivered on 21 May 2011 at Kenyon College, ‘is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self’. It is all about convenience, stupid – about an effortless comfort and comfortable effortlessness; about making the world obedient and pliable; about excising from the world all that would stand, obstinately and pugnaciously, between will and reality. Correction: as what we call ‘reality’ is whatever may resist our will, it is all about putting paid to reality. Living in the world made of one’s wishes alone; of my and your wishes, of our – the purchasers, consumers, users and beneficiaries of technology – wishes.

One wish we all share and feel especially strongly, passionately, about is the wish for love and to be loved. ‘As our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want’, Franzen continues, ‘our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer’ (emphasis added) – as well as to a dustbin and the bottomless landfill of oblivion, let me add. Increasingly, marketed products of technology, like electronic gadgets impelled to act with a mere voice command, or allowing images to grow bigger with a mere spreading of two fingers, incarnate everything we’d always dreamt the loved objects would offer, but seldom if ever managed to get – with the added invaluable quality of never outstaying their welcome and never kicking back once having been kicked out.

Electronic/digital gadgets, the site of the online world, do not just serve love: they are designed for being loved as all other love objects would be loved but seldom agree in the offline world to be. Electronic/digital gadgets are love’s most wholesome objects, setting standards and patterns for both the entry and the exit of love affairs that all other love objects, electronic or fleshy, inanimate or animate, would be able to ignore only at their peril. Most certainly inside the online world; but, increasingly, also in the offline world whenever it is visited by those trained, drilled and groomed in the world’s online half.

The original, offline version of love of a human for a human means commitment, acceptance of risks, readiness for self-sacrifice; it means choosing an uncertain, unmapped and wobbly track in hope – and determination – to share life with an-other. Love may or may not go in pair with happiness, but seldom can it go in pair with comfort and convenience; never with their confident expectation, let alone certainty…on the contrary: it demands stretching one’s skills and will to the utmost, and so portends the possibility of defeat, of unmasking one’s own inadequacy, injury to self-esteem…The sanitized, smoothed-up, thorn-free and risk-free electronic product is anything but love: what it offers is an insurance against ‘the dirt’ which, as Franzen rightly observes, ‘love inevitably splatters on the terror of our self-regard’. The electronically concocted version of love is, in the last account, not at all about love. Consumer technology products catch their clients on the bait of satisfying their narcissism. They promise to reflect well on us – whatever happens and whatever we do or desist from doing. As Franzen points out, ‘we star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery…To “friend” a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors’. But, he adds, ‘trying to be perfectly likeable is incompatible with loving relationships’.

Love is, or threatens to be, an antidote against narcissism. It is also the prime whistle-blower when it comes to debunking the falsehood of the pretences on which we try to perch our self-esteem while laboriously avoiding testing it in field action. What the electronically sterilized and whitewashed, counterfeit version of love truly offers is bets-hedging in the defence of self-esteem against the hazards for which the genuine article is notorious.

The ‘electronic boom’, the fabulous profits garnered from the sale of increasingly ‘user friendly’ gadgets – pliable, submissive, always obedient and seldom if ever contravening the master’s will – bears all the mark of another ‘virgin land’ freshly discovered by the market scouts and put under exploitation. Consumer markets score another conquest: another area of human concerns, worries, desires and struggles, heretofore left to the grassroots initiative and cottage industry and therefore unprofitable, has been successfully commodified and commercialized; activities in that area, as so many other human activities before, have been converted into shopping activities and re-directed to the shopping malls. The area most recently opened to the consumer markets for exploitation is not, however, love – but narcissism.