We all fall into lockdown habits. Creating an abundance of toast out of grieving bread, polishing the proverbial pearl with almost arthritic hands. One of my habits is circular, self-indulgent: considering the nature of these habits. How we spend our time away from the world as we knew it. How we choose to grieve the lives we can no longer live.
Allow me to attempt a soliloquy, then, as that’s all speeches can be now, aiming to offer the impossibility of a novel conception of the pandemic that has been thought so thoroughly and so openly throughout the magical aether of cyberspace. I am going to argue that we are incapable of benefitting from isolation in the same way that we could before this era of late capitalism, or above all, consumerism, kicked into force. And I am going to open with some ill-advised satire.
The article opens with a reference to a book or authority, symbolically flagging the greater intellectual cache that qualifies the writer to deliver on some absurdly general matter of human nature. The work, often cited purely anecdotally, will prove so unbelievably essential to deciphering whatever theme the writer has chosen to examine, that it brings into doubt whether it would even be possible to understand the subject matter without venturing not only to read the referenced material but somehow manage to discover it - given its obscurity and, therefore, value - as an opening anecdote.
I am usually a fan of these openers, as someone who likes to excuse self-aggrandisement by enjoying clever anecdotes and using big words like “self-aggrandisement”. But increasingly the anecdotal opener seems to me to be an act of keeping up appearances, of
choreography. It is style for style’s sake and, far from being incidental and remembered for the sake of a particular article, it can be inserted post-hoc once everything else is written to fit a case in point. Draw a piecemeal reference to the anecdote into the closing paragraph and you’re sitting pretty, ready to bow out into a pool of self-aggrandisement or other big word of your choice. The economic interdependence and social interconnectivity of 21st century life makes how
we appear and how
we construct ourselves a big deal in every facet of our life. That includes anecdotal openers present in even the most tepid take.
How does this tie back to isolation? That requires a detour to socialist ideology, via bureaucracy and also the Peloponnese. Seneca, channelling the Ancient Greek’s appreciation for cross-examination’s lonesome brother, self-reflection, noted how the greatest human achievements were the products of their seclusion. In the modern day, people with similar intentions become “life coaches” or practice pop psychology, offering seminars on time management and preaching endless platitudes on the importance of self-care.
It all stems back to the commodification of time, as Marxists of all colours have noted ever since they had more than one colour. Adorno, wrapping his eyes around the idolisation of consumption, noted how rationality without due recourse had sought to turn the world across into a vast cost-benefit analysis. Scientism beyond science, everyone volunteering their optimism for optimisation. As soon as labour became a measure of
time spent as opposed to
work done, it was inevitable that leisure too would eventually be characterised by time as opposed to temperament. The nature of time off – the cooling off period that enables us to think clearer and deeper when we return to our role as
homo faber, the man who makes, could not pleasantly coexist with late capitalism, where so many jobs separate us so totally from what we “make”. The call centre worker. The warehouse operative. The data entry slave. Every bureaucrat. In a world where work is deprived of meaning, where the purpose of production is extruded beyond recognition, seeking meaning – or at least value – in consumption instead was inevitable.
It is commonplace as anything, a gamut of rationalisation, gamification and commodification in leisure. Applications from Duolingo to Strava expect you to track and measure your performance in practice with the expectation that you otherwise wouldn’t bother. Leisure is measured in a way that is frighteningly similar to how we have grown to measure work. We are no longer as comfortable with an activity if it can’t be quantified, if it can’t be proofed, an invoice provided for services rendered, a job well done turned on its head. If the activity itself isn’t tracked, it might appear on a social network, or, at the most base level, our location history. Nowadays there is always a means to draw back our experiences, a means of evidentiality. This is another layer of façade between what we do and how it is displayed, another signifier atop a signifier.
You can hear entire philosophical schools screaming at me from beyond the grave for butchering the point, so I’ll get back on track here. All of these layers, means of signifying, means of tracking, hide our honest actions. They impair not only what we do but what we get out of it. If we run to get mileage, or cook to take photos, even in the basest instrumental sense, we dissociate from the craft to some degree. It is almost impossible to do something independently of some linked-up system. Even meditation – the act of self-reflection – is now tracked in the popular conscious from without, apps like Headspace drawing us away from our own seclusion. If our actions are products of exterior systems that enable these proofs, we cannot in the end benefit as we might honestly intend. We cannot have peace or seclusion while we are harassed from without.
But we continue, intending to traipse through In Search of Lost Time during our period of extended false solitude, but unable to commit to self-improvement. We are tied back to providing proofs for our isolation crimes, at least those that we choose to track. My mother’s beleaguered toaster does not keep a note of how much toast I’ve made in the past month. I try not to choreograph my habits. But it is questionable how much of this tracking, proofing and evidence-gathering can really be unconsciously avoided in a society that has baked in its love of instrumental reason and commodification of time.
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