enough, the demand for total presence and immediacy arises from mediation; or more precisely from the growing range of tools of communication, including the internet. It is not opposed to technology but its consequence.
According to William J. Mitchell, the economy of presence is characterized by a technologically enhanced market for attention, time, and movement—a process of investment that requires careful choices.3 The point is that technology gives you tools for remote and delayed presence, so that physical presence is just one option and probably the scarcest one. According to Mitchell: “Presence choice occurs when an individual decides whether face-to-face presence is worth the time and money.” Presence in fact becomes a mode of investment.
But the economy of presence is not only relevant for people whose time is in demand and who could basically sell (or barter) more time than they have; it is even more relevant to those who have to work multiple jobs in order to make a living, or even not make a living, to those who coordinate a jumble of microjobs, complete with the logistical nightmare of harmonizing competing schedules and negotiating priorities, or to those who are on permanent standby in the hope that their time and presence will become exchangeable for something else eventually. The aura of unalienated, unmediated, and precious presence depends on a temporal infrastructure that consists of fractured schedules and dysfunctional, collapsing just-in-time economies in which people frantically try to figure out reverberating asynchronicities and the continuous breakdown of riff-raff timetables. It’s junk-time, broken down, kaput on any level. Junktime is wrecked, discontinuous, distracted and runs on several parallel tracks. If you tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if you even manage to be in two wrong places at the same wrong time, it means you live within junktime. With junktime any causal link is scattered. The end is before the beginning and the beginning was taken down for copyright violations. Anything in between has been slashed because of budget cuts. Junktime is the material base of the idea of pure unmediated endless presence.
Junktime is exhausted, interrupted, dulled by ketamine, Lyrica, corporate imagery. Junktime happens when information is not power, but comes as pain. Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion. Today you find yourself crashed and failing. You try to occupy the square or bandwidth but who is going to pick up the kid from school? Junktime depends on velocity, as in the lack thereof. It is time’s substitute: its crash-test dummy.
So how does junktime relate to a cult of presence? Here is a question to all the philosophers out there—and it concerns the title of this talk.
The question is: is this cult of presence revitalizing Heideggerian ideas about Dasein in the age of task rabbits and Amazon Turkers? Is the cult of an embodied and engaged presence that cannot be copied and pasted an expression of the relentless quantification of everything within most contemporary occupations? Is it going hand in hand with the body count performed by institutions to prove their perceived importance by attendance numbers while simultaneously harvesting visitors’ data and preferences? Is the fragmented junktime of multiple occupations, the necessity of multiplying and juggling scraps and shreds of time, creating the conditions for some kitsch ideal of an unalienated uninterrupted radiating endless mindful awful Anwesenheit?
If some of you agree, I suggest to call this text: The Terror of Total Dasein. It sounds like an early movie by Christoph Schlingensief.
Let’s come back to the topic of strike. In an economy of presence a strike necessarily takes on the form of absence. But since the kind of presence I have tried to describe is in fact a range of grades of withholding absence, the absence that tries to oppose it also inversely has to integrate some form of presence. It might need to take on the form of a range of strategic withdrawals, or what Autonomia Operaia called absenteeism.
Let me describe a very simple model situation: A strike could take the form of a work called “The Artist is Absent” in which there would be just a laptop on the table with a prerecorded and looped stare, or rather an animated GIF of her. This is kind of banal, but then again the audience would equally be represented by similar props, because frankly it hasn’t got much time either. Or, actually, the much more elegant and dare I say standard solution for managing the economy of presence and making actual and real-life presence choices is to check your email or Twitter feed while pretending to simultaneously listen to me. In this case you are using yourself, more precisely your own body, as a stand-in or proxy or placeholder, while actually you go about your junktime commitments, which I think is perfectly fine as a form of absence management.
And I also think this is already a form of evasion of the terror of total Dasein.
This small example shows the role of proxies and stand-ins in a situation, in which basically presence is required in multiple places simultaneously, but physically impossible. And this is where techniques of evasion, doubling, dazzle and subterfuge set in. They open up to a proxy politics, a politics of the stand-in and the decoy.
A stand-in or proxy is a very interesting device. It could be a body double or a stunt double. A scan or a scam. An intermediary in a network. A bot or a decoy. Inflatable tanks or text dummies. A militia deployed in proxy warfare. A template. A readymade. A vectorized bit of stock imagery. All these devices have just one thing in common: they help out with classic dilemmas arising from an economy of presence.
Here is a small example of such device. It is one of the simplest examples of desktop proxy and quite widespread. Everyone has seen this generic sample text:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Developed as a printers’ font sample, the design proxy Lorem Ipsum was integrated into standard desktop publishing software as a random text dummy. It became a cornerstone of text-based digital industries and their forms of ADHD occupation.
Why is it used? Because maybe there is no copy. Perhaps the text has not yet been written or aggregated. Or there is no time or money to fill the space at all. Perhaps the writer is dead or asleep or busy on a different tab. In the meantime the space has to be designed. Advertisements have been sold already. The deadline swiftly approaches. This is when Lorem Ipsum swings into action. It is a dummy providing yet another extension, catering to a demand for eternal and relentless presence.
But Lorem Ipsum is not only a dummy. One can also understand it as a text. It is a fragment of a treatise on ethics by Cicero called “On the Ends of Good and Evil.”4 In this treatise, different definitions of goods and evils are compared. And this precise fragment deals with pain—or rather a shortened down version of it, namely “(pa)in itself.”
Let’s focus on the meaning of the original sentence. It reads: “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci velit sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.” Which means: “Neither is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires pain itself because it is pain, but there can be cases where labor and pain can procure some great pleasure.” So basically it is about sucking up for some greater good to arrive later. It is a classical case of deferred gratification, which would later constitute one of the moral pillars of the Protestant work ethic of capitalism.
But what actually does the Lorem Ipsum version mean? It has been cut up to take away the gratification altogether. It translates:
… in itself because it is pain, but there can be cases where labor and pain can procure some great…
The Lorem Ipsum version has blithely cut off pleasure or reward from Cicero’s
