In an essay about seeing, Byung-Chul Han drops this surprising statement:
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-time” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals.
Han, The Burnout Society, page 22
I wanted to argue with this when I first read it—how can we say we live in a world that lacks interruption? But part of Han’s point in this essay is that seeing requires patience, requires letting the sight of something come to you, requires not reacting before you’ve seen fully. And looking more closely I think he has a very good point: which is that we live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.
I’ve no magic wand to restore those intervals, but I have noticed that if you shove those consuming activities away, you can get a glimpse of the between-time they had smothered. It’s like cracking a huge, heavy door that wants very much to shut itself closed again, but if you put your shoulder into it, if you push, you can open some space. You can keep it open.
Byung-Chul Han on attention and boredom:
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and process characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit of the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. Walter Benjamin calls this deep boredom a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.
Han, The Burnout Society, page 13
I hold those first two sentences lightly—it’s self-serving for Han to attribute the cultural achievements of society to characteristics that have been especially helpful for his field of philosophy, and I am unwilling to reject the possibility that other modes—especially non-Western, non-colonialist modes of thinking—have produced great cultural achievements. (Albeit ones probably erased or dismissed by Western thinkers.) That said, I do take to heart his diagnosis of our current predicament, especially with respect to the lack of boredom.
There’s a quote from a writer that has rattled around in my head for years (although I have never been able to source it, leading me to wonder if I accidentally made it up), but it went something like, “I only need a half hour a day to write. But I have to wait around an awful long time for that half hour to show up.” I think about this all the time—that the actual amount of time spent in doing something creative (writing, designing, making music, whathaveyou) is often buffered by hours and hours on either side by real—sometimes pleasant, sometimes infuriating—boredom.
This of course brings me back to Mary Ruefle, whose words on this topic have become something of a mantra: that creativity requires wasting time. But here wasted time isn’t time spent unproductively—time spent scrolling, or playing games, or skittering around the internet—but rather time spent not doing. She calls it “a necessary void of fomentation.” That is, not merely an absence of doing, but a not-doing so complete it doesn’t stimulate, and it doesn’t heal. It merely waits—patiently or otherwise—for an arrival. I fear we have forgotten how to wait.
In The Courage to Create, Rollo May shares a story from Jules Henri Poincaré, writing in his autobiography. In it, Poincaré describes many long days trying to sort out some mathematical question and finding no solution. When he finally becomes overwhelmed with failure, he skips town and goes to the beach. There, while walking, he has a sudden epiphany about the math that had previously escaped him. Of the experience, Poincaré writes:
Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to be incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness.
May, The Courage to Create, page 64
And yet, it’s not rest alone that made the idea arrive, but the oscillation of effort and rest. Poincaré continues:
These sudden inspirations…never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing.
May, The Courage to Create, page 65
Just as importantly, the rest has certain characteristics. Here is May:
I propose that in our day this alternation...requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a world that is “too much with us,” that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us.
May, The Courage to Create, page 66
This brings to mind a note from The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, who asserts that:
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-time” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals.
Han, The Burnout Society, page 22
Poincaré’s epiphany required the interval, the between time, the suspension of expectation and structure. It wasn’t enough that he worked long and hard at a problem; it wasn’t enough that he took some time to rest; it was necessary, also, for him to go to the sea, to walk along the bluff—to welcome solitude and to let it do its work.
Without the interval, there is no solitude; without solitude, the unconscious machine sputters and gasps. Over time, I fear that the gears begin to rust, and it becomes harder to start it up again. But not impossible. Never impossible.
It’s common to talk about Taylorism—the practice of so-called “scientific management” that’s most known for it’s reviled use of stopwatches—as if it were a thing of the past, as if we had somehow moved beyond it. But like a lot of coercive practices, Taylorism didn’t so much retire as rebrand. As workers rebelled against oppressive bureaucracies, the postindustrial work ethic shifted from work as a moral imperative to work as self-realization in a process that Nikil Saval grimly calls “self-Taylorization.” In essence, the timekeeper was internalized.
Whereas, for Taylorism, the self-organization, ingenuity, and creativity of the workers were to be combated as the source of all dangers of rebellion and disorder, for Toyotism these things were a resource to be developed and exploited. The total and entirely repressive domination of the worker’s personality was to be replaced by the total mobilization of that personality.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 30
Toyotism—contrasted with Fordism, which adopted Taylor’s model—involved a practice where small teams of people would manage a limited amount of work-in-progress through communication with teams up- and downstream of their work. Versions of it were subsequently adopted in “agile” software development and have become so engrained in product organizations that they are often barely remarked upon; it’s just how things are done. But as with most just-so stories, it’s worth considering how it came to be—and who benefits from the way things are.
[The head of training at Volkswagen] first explains that “transferring entrepreneurial skills to the shopfloor” makes it possible “largely to eliminate the antagonisms between labor and capital…If the work teams have great independence to plan, carry out, and monitor processes, material flows, staffing, and skills…then you have a large enterprise made up of independent small entrepreneurs, and that constitutes a cultural revolution.”
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 44
That is, by offering “elite” status to some workers, and building a system in which they monitored their own work in excruciating detail, Toyota could keep the administrators in their offices while remaining confident that the same surveillance, operational focus, and company-first perspective would be maintained—this time by the workers themselves. Giving some workers permission to perform as entrepreneurs just meant they worked harder for the company even as they became convinced they were working for themselves. Men in stopwatches are unnecessary when the worker’s own conscience will do the job.
And of course, that “elite” status is, by definition, scarce. It depends on other workers continuing to toil in the old, Taylorist ways, performatively monitored and repressed. (Gorz points out that at the time he was writing about Toyota, the workers organized under the entrepreneurial model represented a mere 10-15% of the workforce; the rest were subcontractors, who were “increasingly Taylorized” as they moved down the ladder.) And, more to the point, it depends on a system in which fewer and fewer people are employed at all.
It could hardly be more clearly stated that the workers taken in by the big companies are a small “elite,” not because they have higher levels of skill, but because they have been chosen from a mass of equally able individuals in such a way as to perpetuate the work ethic in an economic context in which work is objectively losing its “centrality”: the economy has less and less need of it. The passion for, devotion to, and identification with work would be diminishing if everyone were able to work less and less. It is economically more advantageous to concentrate the small amount of necessary work in the hands of a few, who will be imbued with the sense of being a deservedly privileged elite by virtue of the eagerness which distinguishes them from the “losers.” Technically, there really is nothing to prevent the firm from sharing out the work between a larger number of people who would work only 20 hours a week. But then those people would not have the “correct” attitude to work which consists in regarding themselves as small entrepreneurs turning their knowledge capital to good effect.
So the firm “largely…eliminates the antagonisms between work and labor” for the stable core of its elite workers and shifts those antagonisms outside its field of vision, to the peripheral, insecure, or unemployed workers. Post-Fordism produces its elite by producing unemployment; the latter is the precondition for the former. The “social utility” of the elite cannot, for that reason, be assessed solely from the angle of the use-value of its production or the “service rendered to users.” Its members can no longer believe themselves useful in a general way, since they produce wealth and unemployment in the self-same act. The greater their productivity and eagerness for work, the greater also will be unemployment, poverty, inequality, social marginalization, and the rate of profit. The more they identify with work and with their company’s successes, the more they contribute to producing and reproducing the conditions of their own subjection, to intensifying the competition between firms, and hence to making the battle for productivity the more lethal, the threat to everyone’s employment—including their own—the more menacing, and the domination of capital over workers and society the more irresistible.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 45
That is, the existence of an elite workforce—whether it’s workers managing a kanban process in a Toyota factory, or workers driving agile development at a product company—is predicated on an underclass of people who either work in less sustainable conditions or else are proscribed from work at all. The former has come into some awareness in recent years, as workers at Google and elsewhere have organized not only well-paid engineers and designers but also support staff and contractors who are paid in a year what an engineer makes in a month. Those very highly-paid engineering roles simply couldn’t exist without the people toiling in the support mines or tagging text and images for AI training—often dreadful work that’s barely remunerated at all. But what Gorz is calling out here is that isn’t only bad work that the elite work depends on—it’s also the absence of work. The “disruption” that the tech industry has so long prided itself on is just another word for “unemployment.”
But there’s also a gesture here towards another way: the less that elite identifies with their work and with their companies’ successes, the more they admit of their own insecurity and of their collaboration in creating it, the less menacing that threat becomes, the more space is opened up for different futures.
I am not saying, however, that post-Fordist workers cannot or ought not to identify with what they do. I am saying that what they do cannot and should not be reduced solely to the immediately productive work they accomplish, irrespective of the consequences and mediate effects which it engenders in the social environment. I say, therefore, that they must identify with everything they do, that they must make their work their own and assume responsibility for it as subjects, not excluding from this the consequences it produces in the social field. I say that they ought to be the subjects of—and also the actors in—the abolition of work, the abolition of employment, the abolition of wage labor, instead of abandoning all these macroeconomic and macro-social dimensions of their productive activity to market forces and capital. They ought, therefore, to make the redistribution of work, the diminution of its intensity, the reduction of working hours, the self-management of the hours and pace of work, and the guarantee of purchasing power demands inherent in the meaning of their work.
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 46
Abolition is both destruction and reconstruction; in abolishing work, you become able to create it anew. For too long, “work” has been synonymous with waged work, with the work we long for an escape from. And everything else becomes the “life” that stands in opposition to work, as if work were somehow an equal to the life it sucks dry. But what if work was all the change we make in the world, with all the people we make that change with—colleagues and comrades, neighbors and friends, kin in all the kingdoms. What if work wasn’t only what we do at work, but all the ways that work moves out into the world, and all the work we do elsewhere—whether in our homes or in our streets. What if our work is all the things we give a fuck about? What becomes possible then?
In an essay titled, “Why Revolution is Impossible Today,” Byung-Chul Han writes:
The system-preserving power of the disciplinary, industrial society was oppressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners, and this violent exploitation prompted protest and resistance. In that situation, a revolution that would overturn the ruling relations of production was a possibility. In that system, it was clear who the oppressors, as well as the oppressed, were. There was a concrete opponent, a visible enemy who could serve as the target of resistance.
The neoliberal system of rule is structured in an altogether different fashion. The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive. It is no longer as clearly visible as it had been under the disciplinary regime. There is no longer a concrete opponent, no one who is taking away the freedom of the people, no oppressor to be resisted.
Out of the oppressed worker, neoliberalism creates the free entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise. Everyone is both master and slave. The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself. Those who fail blame themselves and feel ashamed. People see themselves, rather than society, as the problem.
Disciplinary power, attempting to control people by force, by subjecting them to a dense matrix of orders and prohibitions, is inefficient. Much more efficient is that technique of power that ensures that people subordinate themselves to the system of rule voluntarily.
Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, page 16
Han has previously written about the “entrepreneur of the self” in The Burnout Society, which connects such self-exploitation to its inevitable outcome. The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.
