Thoughts Toward A Politics of Interruption

Thinking Global: A Brief Preliminary Note

I am very happy to join the esteemed company of this site’s contributors. I am grateful to them for their help and encouragement, and for the opportunity to continue to interact with the wonderful readers and commenters here.

As in my last set of guest columns, I will try to continue to work the “capital-T Theory beat.” Speaking selfishly, I found it tremendously educational to experiment with the blending of intellectual-historical glosses of major debates in critical theory, and more speculative reporting on what seems today to be in the air—registering what is happening now and anticipating what might be coming next. So this is what I will be focusing upon, moving forward.

I will likely also be writing a great deal about music, which is, after all, an important form of thinking (about which one might say, after Lefty Frizzell: “look what thoughts will do”).

At this point, it might not be a bad idea to address the question of why I find “capital-T Theory” interesting (vital, even).

Q: Why do you find this stuff interesting?

A: A joke from my ancestors, set in Austria at a time of ever-worsening anti-Semitism.

A Jewish man of modest means walks into an immigration office in Vienna, seeking the advice of the clerk about where he might move. The clerk begins to spin a globe that is sitting on his desk, stopping at various countries and explaining why entry into each is beset with difficulties. In one country you need a certain amount of money, in another a labor permit or a certificate of employment. For another country the passport has no validity, a fourth land is not accepting any immigrants, etc. On and on, in this fashion, the clerk continues to whirl the globe. Finally, in desperation, the Jewish man explodes: “Haven’t you got another globe?”[1]

Of Taxicab Confessions and One-Armed Bandits

What I would like to do in this brief essay is to think about—and to invite dialogue about––a theoretical term that is not, to my knowledge, yet available as a fully fleshed-out resource. This term is “interruption.” It seems to me that that understanding interruption as political might provide the key to better understanding a wide variety of popular culture practices.

It makes sense to write about this politics of interruption for an audience of intellectual historians, I hope, because careful reflection on interruption gets to the heart of a certain kind of thinking about which we would like to know more.

The prospect of theorizing a “politics of interruption” entered my thoughts when I came across a fascinating passage from Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form:

I have read that there is an especially high incidence of stomach ulcers among taxi drivers–an occupational illness that would not seem to be accounted for merely by poor and irregular meals, since these are equally the lot of workers at other kinds of jobs. Do we not see, rather, a bodily response to the intensely arhythmic quality of the work itself, the irritation in the continual jagginess of traffic, all puzzle and no pace, and only the timing of the cylinders performing with regularity, as if all the ritual of the occupational act had been drained off, into the routine of the motor’s explosions and revolutions?[2]

Burke suggests here that something like exposure to or proneness vis-à-vis “interruption” might be both a politically and aesthetically salient social fact. In the gastric distress of the taxi driver there is evidence—paradoxically enough––of both of the resistance of the body and the psyche to “expecting the unexpected,” and a habituation to life under the aegis of alea, the rule of accident and chance.

In context, Burke is also advancing a stronger claim: that proletarian literature need not understand itself as wedded to documentary realism and the melodrama of everyday working life. Is not “jagginess”—“all puzzle and no pace”––the defining feature of modernist art? Burke is thus weighing in on a controversy that consumed Left theorists in the first half of the twentieth century (today we think of it as the Lukács/Bloch debate): the dispute regarding the preferability of “realism” versus “expressionism” as modes of revolutionary aesthetics. What Burke wants us to consider is that, from a strictly materialist perspective, the proletarian aesthetic is at least as “expressionistic” as it is “realistic,” and that at the level of form (the presentation of a narrative, the texture of a shift on the job, in duration) it may be palpably more so.

At about the time that I began to think seriously about this passage from Burke, I came across another provocative fragment on interruption, in a much more recent text: Natasha Dow Schüll fascinating study Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.[3]  Schüll begins with an ethnographic account of hardcore electronic gamblers in Las Vegas—those who avoid the flashier games and card tables in favor of digital slot machines.

Schüll introduces us to Mollie:

When I ask Mollie if she is hoping for a big win, she gives a short laugh and a dismissive wave of her hand. “In the beginning there was excitement about winning,” she says, “but the more I gambled, the wiser I got about my chances. Wiser, but also weaker, less able to stop. Today when I win— and I do win, from time to time— I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.” Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing— to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” I ask Mollie to describe the machine zone. She looks out the window at the colorful movement of lights, her fingers playing on the tabletop between us. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there— you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”

From this encounter with Mollie, Schüll cuts to a different ethnographic scene, also in Las Vegas: a convention of gambling industry entrepreneurs and experts, gathered to consider the future of machine gambling. “Echoing Mollie’s wish to stay in the machine zone,” Schüll writes, “they spoke of gamblers’ desire for ‘time-on-device,’ or TOD.” The popular desire for longer and longer spells of freedom from interruption—smoother and more intense passages into the “machine zone”—serves as a spur to technological innovation. “On these newer products, they can really get into that zone,” says one industry insider to Schüll. The computerization of the slot machine, it seems, has facilitated the development of a new apparatus of freedom from interruption:

The gambling experience has evolved in step with technological innovation. Once a relatively straightforward operation in which players bet a set amount on the outcome of a single payline, today machine gambling begins with a choice among games whose permutations of odds, stakes size, and special effects are seemingly endless. Instead of inserting coins into a slot as in the past, players are more likely to insert paper money, bar-coded paper tickets, or plastic cards with credit stored on chips or magnetic stripes. To activate the game, they no longer pull a lever, but instead press a button or touch a screen. Denomination of play can vary from one cent to one hundred dollars, and players can choose to bet from one to as many as one thousand coin credits per game. On or above the play area, which typically features a video screen or three-dimensional reels behind glass, “pay tables” indicate the number of credits to be awarded in the event that certain symbols or cards appear together. To the right, a digital credit meter displays the number of credits remaining in the machine. Linked via telecommunications systems to a central server, the machines also perform data-gathering and marketing functions for the casino. Critical nodes in the larger networked system of the casino rather than stand-alone units, they have “become the central nervous system of the casino,” an industry representative remarked in 2007.

These passages from Burke and Schüll led me to review the theoretical literature that might be relevant to fleshing out a politics of interruption. The options are virtually endless, although I have come to think that feminist and queer theoretical works on time and temporality, from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to José Esteban Muñoz Cruising Utopia and J. Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, would have to be central points of reference. Situationist International writings on the city also seem particularly germane, as does Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari’s distinction of “smooth” as opposed to “striated” space (and parallel notions of “nomadic” or “durational” vs. “segmented” or “segmentary” time).

Without question, however, the canonical text that seems to me to gesture most forcefully towards a potential politics of interruption is Walter Benjamin’s famous “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” [4] It is thus appropriate that we should conclude with a very brief consideration of that text.

Walter Benjamin, Shock Jock

Benjamin’s theorization of interruption in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” —arrived at by way of meditation on the category of “shock”––takes the form of an extended commentary not so much on the author of Fleurs du Mal as on Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).  

Freud’s pivotal post-WWI text—wherein the notion of “death drive” is introduced––signifies a rejection of earlier theories of the function of “memory traces” as somehow embedded in the conscious mind. Consciousness is not at all concerned with remembering, as such, Freud now argues; rather it serves a different function––“protection against stimuli.”

For Benjamin, what Freud captures here is a central theme of modernity: our perceptual response to the interruptions occasioned by capitalist development (everything from pulsating advertisements to total war) is primarily oriented towards insulation and anticipation of shocks.

Memory, then—as represented by the puzzling clinical detail that motivates Freud to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the endless repetition of traumatic battlefield memories by recovering soldiers, “accident neuroses which reproduce the catastrophe in which the patient was involved,” which would seem to have no justification according to the Utilitarians’ “hedonic calculus”—is primarily a way of preparing for shocks. “The more readily consciousness registers these shocks,” Benjamin writes, “the less likely are they to have a traumatic effect.” Imaginative repetition of traumatic experiences “endeavor to master the stimulus retroactively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.”

This notion is anticipated in the writing of Paul Valéry, in passages such as: “The impressions and sense perceptions of man actually belong in the category of surprises, they are evidence of an insufficiency in man. … Recollection is… an elemental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organizing the reception of stimuli which we initially lacked.”

The question for Baudelaire and Valéry, as for Benjamin and Kenneth Burke is this: “how lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which the shock experience has become the norm.” And how that might make interruption a term with which we should further dwell.