I read Mark Fisher’s excellent little book Capitalist Realism this week. It’s a short book long on insights, many of which provoked me, some of which I disagreed with, and a few of which I want to share. Here’s the first of the latter kind, from a discussion of the post-disciplinary nature of contemporary higher education.
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many—and these are A-level students mind you&mash;will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be “boring.” What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate “New Flesh” that is “too wired to concentrate” and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube, and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.
It’s a convincing account, for me. Not to mention a retrospectively obvious one. How often do we hear complaints of boredom and misread them for gripes about the material rather than the experience? Often the students themselves help confuse the situation by partaking in orthogonal acts of commensurate challenge in a different domain.
Yet, as Fisher points out, when students “want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger” they miss the fact that “the indigestibility is Nietzsche.” Most of the time, institutions acquiesce. We now plan for, attend retreats on, or write grants in support of “new pedagogies” to staunch the disciplinary bleeding or (more frequently) to muster new methods that would deliver stimulations “more compatible” with today’s “changing media environment.”
I’m well aware that videogames are often among the so-called salves to educational ills, and I’ll draw attention to the fact that in all of my lectures over the past year or two on the topic, I go to great lengths to contrast the difficult unobviousness of (good) games from the saccharine immediacy of the very digital media technologies that usually motivate institutional interest in pedagogical reform.
To put it differently, a good Nietsche videogame might be just as “boring” as a text; just in a different way—one that focused more, for example, on a system of thought.
Comments
Mark N.
I’ve occasionally grumbled in this regard (despite still being in my 20s), but I occasionally wonder if there isn’t something to be said for the other side. After emerging from weeks spent engrossed in books of a particular discipline, I can’t help but wonder, “was this the best use of my 3 weeks?”. Is it that people don’t like to concentrate because people are worse now, or that it’s harder to justify spending 3 weeks on a niche when it’s much easier these days to realize that there are other niches, which not only exist in theory, but constantly make their existence known and demand attention alongside the one you’re trying to be engrossed in?
Not that immediacy is always good, but I wonder if we’re not looking at something like: it’s harder to be happy in ghettos when you can see the barbed wire.
Kevin Ryan
Carey Mulligan’s teenage ingenue in “An Education” is distracted from her Oxford-bound prep school studies by the excitement of an older man, played by Peter Sarsgaard. At one point she discusses the meaning of education, and how the boring headmistress (Emma Thomson) and her Latin teacher complete the cycle by being bored as students, only learning to be boring themselves. School has cut off her communication to the brilliant lights of clubs in Paris instead of electronics.
Ian Bogost
@Mark
Determining whether or not it’s good or bad might not be as important as recognizing the fact that it’s happening, I suppose. That’s what McLuhan would have us do (WWMcLD?). Once we do so, we’re able to make observations and judgments about how to steer ourselves within the new currents of new media. However, that’s not what many educational institutions are doing; instead, they’re asking themselves how they might make the classroom and the textbook as gratifying as Twitter and Facebook, taking the latter to be the correct model without any need for adjustment.
@Kevin
Great connection, thanks for sharing it.
Jonathan Baldwin
I try in my own teaching to make “boring” things interesting and certainly subscribe to the medium or experience being the thing that’s boring, not the content.
What I find, though, and love proving to cohorts of students year after year, is that the moment they find the content interesting, the medium in which they find it will be irrelevant.
The best evidence I have of this is wandering round an illustration studio one day and finding a copy of Bourdieu’s “Distinction” on a student’s desk with many post-its attached to page after page. All because I’d pointed out something remarkably interesting about what he wrote and got them to question their own behaviour.
Similarly my current design students have just turned in some of the best analyses of non-design research I’ve ever read (which will turn in to design research and practice next semester). How we got to that point from “this is boring” is something I need to write up. But it starts with getting rid of the reading list and giving them one, very interesting but not altogether relevant book to read. They find themselves inevitably talking about it with each other and before they know it, reading is an experience to share, not a private activity.
Some people call what I do “dumbing down”. Given the results, I call it “dumbing up”. Get people interested in the experience of finding something out, and the rest follows naturally. Bore them from day one and say the problem is them, and you’ve lost them forever.
Of course, as Bourdieu himself would probably point out, it is the role of the academy to filter out those not worthy of membership, not support those who may turn out to be.
Ernest Adams
God help us when these little twerps start running for office. Legislation and regulations cannot be written, interpreted, executed, and adjudicated at law, as a series of tweets.
Complex issues require a lot of complex language and time dedicated to understanding it. For all the popularizers of science and history do for us on TV (Carl Sagan is a hero of mine), they cannot actually convey the essential minutiae of the issues in a documentary, any more than Fox News can (or even cares to) convey the complexities of, e.g. Middle East politics.
Don’t like reading? Get the fuck out of the university, because it’s what you’re here to do. Go work at McDonalds.
Erik
@Ernest I think you will find most universities around the world have to keep as many students as possible, and with increasing costs, there are increasing realworld distractions for even the more disciplined and interested ones. I also have to ask if the universities are all about reading, are they not about knowledge-which encompasses text AND oral traditions? Socrates’ peripatetic school did not necessarily all read, but they did all listen.
@Jonathan-I think you mean, smarting up? Bourdieu for design students is a great idea, I’ll look at applying it myself!
@all-video games have been accused of creating this lower attention span, I wonder if in fact muc of the ‘blame’ is tv/music videos. Or perhaps it is the spread of media in general (Baudrillard here we come); in that now ancient tome the writer said even classical music was being played faster and faster.
Jonathan Baldwin
@Erik – smarting up… mmm I like it!
I give them chapters 8-9 of “Understanding Bourdieu” by Schirato et al, after a talk on taste and the design canon to get them fired up. Very accessible way in to his ideas.
@Ernest “little twerps” suggests a rush to judgement which suggests a lack of critical ability on your part. I’d rather have someone who didn’t read but was open minded as a student than someone who claimed to read, yet knew little and wasn’t prepared to learn any more…
David Rylance
Hi Ian. First time poster, long time reader. Strangely enough, in a book I felt little but admiration for in almost all respects, it was exactly this section on pedagogy, discipline and what Fisher calls ‘depressive hedonia’ that almost made me turn away from the book altogether. As an ex-student not so far removed from that age bracket myself, I felt Fisher’s take on teenage non-responsiveness to be very tone-deaf and accusatory, embittered even, at a youth held to be a disappointment of sorts, unrisen to such pressing political realities. For a theorist that posits himself so cogently and eloquently against the lingering orthodoxies of ’68, I find their spectre to be palpable in this passage.
See, although I read a paragraph like the one above and understand immediately the phenomenon it’s describing, the example feels oddly laboratory-like to me and devoid of nuance, stuck through like a moth on a tack. A little later on in that same chapter, Fisher relates a quite striking anecdote in which he describes a student in a class he taught who would keep his headphones in without the music on â?? or alternatively, would keep the headphones around his neck, with the music on, but out of earshot. In each case, Fisher deduces that the student needed to have the matrix of pleasure-culture actively at hand at all times, needed to know that it was there, to be had at a momentâ??s notice. This is what he labels ‘depressive hedonia’: “the melancholic inability to strive after anything but immediate pleasure”, as it was nicely summarized recently by Brian Dillon at The Irish Times.
My problem is this. Why must we assume that the student was in a state of addictive withdrawal – “removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube, and fast food”? What if the student needed the headphones primarily as a type of anxiety management against the classroom, placing a symbolic barrier of sorts between himself and the room in which he was expected to participate with a degree of fluency, articulateness and incisiveness that, in this society, it’s just as likely he would feel eminently unequal to. To me, the headphones seem much more a way to insulate one from the angst of socio-academic participation in than it is “to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.” Indeed, why must we assume the boredom and torpor of students is derived from itchy disinterest/deprivation rather than is a patent symptom of their social disorientation? How come it’s assumed boredom is due to an energy ‘overdose’ rather than plain and simple fatigue? Because the thing that Fisher fails to take into account is precisely that pleasure-culture is both a lot of work in its own way â?? as well the only work increasingly that kids feel they are skilled to capably do. It’s in this sense that I’d contend that it would be far more accurate to think of their desire for the Nietzsche-hamburger not as some glib reduction of complexity but as an utterly sincere desire to want to master a recalcitrant like Nietzsche, tied together with a frustration at their lack of facility and orientation toward the more classical time and terms of work that such mastery – especially in what Fisher perfectly calls “the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems” – requires.
While I agree with you that the tired cry for ‘new pedagogies’ is not the magic bullet solution to this problem, I also think that the increasing institutional immiseration of teachers is too often deflected onto the far easier – and more eminently available – target of the students, even though students are, as ever, the most rights deprived group in the structure (apart from the phony, ressentiment-empowerment of lecturer grading and course review). In my own experiences, I’ve come to think that it is not that a thinker like Nietzsche is innately indigestible (as reassuring a notion as that implicitly is) so much as it is that students are rendered institutionally indigestible to the teachers by the result-orientation of the classroom. If Nietzsche is plonked down in a form that feels mute, reproachful and non-culturally-communicative, if he is handed over devoid of consideration of the context that leads in to the moment of teaching this text to these students, it only tripwires an immediate, almost knee-jerk ‘deterritorialization’ of sorts on the part of the students – in a perverse twist on D+G – where the students flee the site of constricting ‘authority’ precisely because they feel amputated and deprived of autonomy in that setting. Weirdly, for that very reason, I believe that teaching today, in all and any context, must involve the strategies of the psychoanalyst. That’s how traumatizing our pleasure-culture has become, not by being pleasurable but by denying our ability to rest. Iâ??m reminded of Zizekâ??s remarks on Lenin who withdrew to Switzerland in the dire times of 1915 to a kind of inner repose in which he read Hegel. When he re-emerged, it was with the refined capacity to strike at the heart of the matter. The classroom must be made a retreat for inner exile, each studentâ??s Switzerland. It must not demand; it must ease. Boredom and torpor have less to do with withdrawal from instant gratification and more to do with the realization that such gratification is held by culture to be the only work that matters. Theory seems irrelevant, at best, compared to this and immaterial at most. Ennui and lethargy are the symptoms of kids who are encultured and exhausted too early, jaded by pleasure and, thus, to it, but also utterly versed in culture and aching for ways to make notion of it. They are the new refugee-workers of the first world, who most certainly can’t ‘read’ but not out of distraction; rather, they have no â??timeâ?? to read due the same annihilation of ‘literacy’ one finds in the factory or the war zone, where oneâ??s attention span is spinning onwards to the next new demand for oneâ??s utmost attention, indeed, oneâ??s survival, demands which seem sugary and delightful in our moment but press down upon them with all the symbolic pressure (in a Lacanian sense) as a Fordist conveyer belt or a rain of bombs from the sky. These kids crave a codex of cultural critique and detachment but find that learning treats them as hostiles, staring at them balefully for not being immediately up to its deteriorating standards, even as it hands them an instructional map without directions, swarming with signs, on which they are about to be marked.
Keith Anselm
David – I find your point about exhaustion to be apt. While I am now older than the current undergrad cohort, I am familiar with the feeling of pressing culture, pressing data. My RSS feed, the 200 odd movies I have at home, unwatched, and the 12 page list of movies I plan to watch which I have not even acquired; the video games I download and do not play, or buy and do not finish; the scores of books I have bought and haven’t read; the books I’ve downloaded and never open; thousands of songs unlistened to; the songs I don’t get a chance to learn, as I have another album to listen to; recipes to try, restaurants to try, podcast to listen to; and behind it all the ceaseless drumbeast of my RSS feed and twitter account.
For years, I’ve spent all of my free time diving through an embarrassment of riches that grows every year. Even walking the dog, I have my headphones running.
I am old enough to remember not having the web – I first encountered it in 8th grade and it was a novelty – Netscape and personal webpages – and a librarian trying to teach us how to use Gopher, listservs, and BBS’s.
I miss mental quiet, terribly. This IS exhausting.