Foreword by
Carl Hegemann
Translation by
Robert E. (Steve) Goodwin
© for the English edition by Alexander Verlag Berlin 2019
© by Alexander Verlag Berlin 2013
Alexander Wewerka, Postbox 19 18 24, D-14008 Berlin
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Layout, typesetting and cover design: Antje Wewerka
Editor: Christin Heinrichs-Lauer, Robert E. (Steve) Goodwin
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ISBN 978-3-89581-502-7 (eBook)
The Metaphysics of Wasting Time
Foreword by Carl Hegemann
Introduction
IThe Economization of Time
Experienced Time, Physical Time
Clock Time 30
The Tyranny of the Clock: Time and Discipline
The Inner Clock: Internalization and Bad Conscience
Sacred Time: The Worshipper’s Duty
Time Management: Self-Exploitation and Subjectivation
IIThe Concept of Waste
The Ultimate Machine
Surplus: Waste as Economic Necessity
The Utility Principle and Tamed Pleasure
Glorious Waste: Insubordination and Sovereignty
IIIWasting Time
The Most Grievous of Sins
1. Wasting Time: A Delimitation
Intended Intentionlessness
Suspension of the Future: The Carefree State
Passivity
2. Instances
Idiorrhythmy: Sauntering and Dawdling
Rhythm of Drowsing: The Flâneur
Omissions: Procrastination and Truancy
Waiting: Diversion
Leisure: Delightful Indifference
3. Outlook: Theatre, for Example
Come to the Theatre!
Biographies
Bibliography
Illustrations
Due to its lack of tranquillity, our civilization is heading toward a new barbarism. At no time have active people, that is to say, restless people, counted for more. Among the necessary corrections in the character of humanity that we must therefore undertake is a considerable strengthening of its contemplative element.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the summer of 2011 Julian Pörksen made a film with the disconcerting title Sometimes We Sit and Think and Sometimes We Just Sit. The film was shown in February 2012 at the Berlinale, in the “Perspectives of German Cinema” section. At that time he was still studying dramaturgy at the Hochschule für Musik and Theater in Leipzig. The film was the result of a self-organized internship within the framework of his courses. This small book titled Waste Your Time can be seen as providing the theoretical basis of the film.
The unavoidable problem – that even a defence of doing nothing, of uneventfulness or time uselessly wasted, requires much work and discipline if it is to be persuasive – was clear to Pörksen from the outset, and that is precisely the joke behind the whole undertaking. In the programme booklet to The Cherry Orchard (in a production by Luk Perceval at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg which emphasized the play’s almost complete lack of event), Pörksen refers to his film and concludes by saying, “The wonderful paradox of this work was how much planning and activity it took to make a film that centred on an idler, how much determined effort it required to gain something artistically from avoidance of action and create a space for it in the viewer’s consciousness.” The notes also tell us what led to his working with such concentration and persistence on the theme of inactivity and non-utility:
Happiness beckons those who are active. Voluntary inactivity, by contrast, is attended by a prohibition; to decide on a course of uneventfulness is not an option. Last year I saw a play with the actor Peter René Lüdike who made a game of this prohibition by doing nothing on stage for a virtuosic half-hour. An avoidance-artist. I wrote a playbook for him and we made a film together that circles around this idea: Peter, a wealthy 50-year-old man with family still intact, moves into senior housing with the idea of living out the rest of his life there. He is a “voluntary senior” who has entered an institution that in the public perception is something like a penultimate resting place, a place to die in rather than live. Peter, however, sits cheerfully unproductive by the drawn curtains in his room and undergoes no change throughout the rest of the film. Instead, as a hero of passivity, he delegates the task of dramatic development to secondary figures who take issue with his decision and try to come up with new interpretations. While his doctor sees symptoms of depression in his behaviour and thinks he has to help him, his care worker regards him as a model, a dropout from the society of exhaustion. His son, on the other hand, sees his decision as an escape to inactivity that ultimately amounts to attempted suicide and wants to rescue him. An elderly woman who also lives in the home eventually falls in love with his lack of interest because to her it is a space of freedom, a value-free zone.
We might add that the only “luxury” the film’s hero has brought with him to his penultimate resting place is the Ultimate Machine that Pörksen describes at the beginning of the second chapter of this book and which has no other function than to turn itself off as soon as someone has turned it on. This process is fundamental to the metaphysics of wasting time.
A useless film on inactivity and the dynamic that generates inactivity in its environment. And now a small, intelligently calculated and solidly constructed book on the joys of wasting time and ignoring self-evident economic truths. It is a joy to read, at least I have found it so. It leaves me with the exhilarating feeling of having witnessed a long overdue process of liberation. Pörksen allows himself to utter a few simple truths that are still taboo, although most people at least occasionally act according to them, if only with a bad conscience. They are nothing new, and there is probably very little danger that they will ever fall into oblivion, but they do not fit as positive maxims into the logic of the creative market society’s political economy, where thoughts of utility and advantage, not to mention personal egotism, seem to be the driving force of all action.
Time and money, as we well know, are synonyms in our market- and performance-based society; it is not permitted to waste either. For the rationality of all economic activity is measured by time. Time expended to achieve an end result tells us whether a specific activity makes sense or not. It only makes sense from the economic point of view if it pays off, if not immediately, then later at least. Julian Pörksen opts out of this self-evident principle of accounting. He sets up a parallel account and seeks to explain the necessity of the other hidden side of the economy, which resists all instrumental, goal-directed activity. This side is always present as an implicit negativity to be overcome, for if there were no inclination to non-rationality, waste, excess, and asocial behaviour, all goal-directed action, all self-discipline, would be superfluous – it would be targeting a void. In other words, all these lovely virtues – discipline, self-definition, optimization, etc. – can be postulated as meaningful only to the extent that there exist opposing tendencies that need to be curbed and held in check. If lethargy and lack of discipline were ever eliminated, their antitheses would instantly lose their meaning.
But the discourse Pörksen represents is not primarily about this conceptual interdependence; it is concerned with a provocative re-evaluation of uselessness. Terms typically used to criticize are given a positive sense. Wasting time is to be seen as something important and good. This recalls Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgement: the “disinterested delight” in the beautiful, the enjoyment of something that is not to be used for anything else – enjoyment that Kant reserves for aesthetic contemplation alone. Schiller too has assigned the “aesthetic impulse to form” (which releases man “from all that might be called constraint, alike in the physical and in the moral sphere” [On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 27th Letter]) to its own “joyous kingdom”, where it is allowed to express itself in play beyond all goals as long as it does not deny the illusory character of its action. Yet for Pörksen, wasting time and doing nothing are not confined to the aesthetic world; they are desirable positions in day-to-day life as well.
To claim value for aesthetic positions outside of art, however, is regarded as fundamentally suspect. One of the first to discover this was Dostoevsky, who declared war on the so-called “instrumental rationality” (Zweckrationalität) of the political economy and opposed it with “nonsense”. In his Notes from Underground, he describes the machinery of humanity’s constant improvement by the consistent use of reason as repulsive and indecent. For the Underground Man the idea that all human behaviour could be cogently and validly determined by a rational higher development was a nightmare. Private advantage as the uncontested guideline of all action seemed to him a dead end; and he found the maxims that people always act out of “well understood private interest” and never do anything detrimental to themselves to be both empirically false and inhuman. Principles like these would ultimately bring about an end to all surprise and unpredictability, to everything, in other words, that distinguishes a human being from a machine. Through utilitarian economic thinking, human beings will become “organ stops” which do nothing but “function” (Dostoevsky, Notes I.7, trans. Constance Garnett [online]). If rational progress could declare once and for all what was most advantageous for us in every conceivable situation, there would no longer be any freedom or possibility of choice.
Dostoevsky, 150 years ago, was probably one of the first to describe the logical downside of advantage-rationality or a planning calculus. He pulled the figurative emergency cord by claiming to find the greatest advantage precisely in non-rationality, in the ignoring of calculations, in nonsense: “One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy – is that very ‘most advantageous advantage’ which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms” (ibid.).
Dostoevsky’s thesis – that human beings can only prove they are more than “organ stops” by not doing what is expected of them, but some nonsense instead, and that their whole power consists in this – would, if taken seriously, torpedo the entire political economy, which down to the present time must take utility and effectiveness among market participants as its supreme maxims.
Here in the St. Petersburg cellar a thought was born which so inspired Nietzsche that he declared Dostoevsky to be “one of the happiest discoveries of my life” (Twilight of the Idols, section 45), and Bataille’s theory of waste is clearly part of the same tradition.
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