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 sentence. There is no more gratification. So now you are not enduring pain for some greater good or thereafter but just enduring it without actually knowing why. There may just as well be no outcome, no product, no pay, no end. In Lorem Ipsum pain is not a means to an end, it just so happens.
Junktime, the fragmented time of networked occupation, is to continuous time as Lorem Ipsum is to its original. Its fragments are scrambled, cut up, shut up and confused in their sequence, spoiling the glow of the uninterrupted flow of text and meaning. And every time I read Lorem Ipsum’s mutilated jumble I cannot help thinking of Cicero’s head and hands cut off and ending up being nailed to the rostra on the Forum Romanum following his assassination.
There is a variation of Lorem Ipsum on the website of Berghain gay sexclub laboratory. It shows some interesting differences to the standard Lorem Ispum. First of all, it is on the rules of the club, so the Lorem Ispum sentences actually become a code of conduct.5
There are quite a few changes to the standard Cicero mash up. The word pleasure, or a variation thereof, has been reintroduced. It also goes on praising the virtues of physical exercise, which makes total sense in a place which has an athlete fetish party on offer. This version loops back between pain, toil as pleasure, and physical exercise or sports.
The sexclub rules of conduct become an extremely stressful-sounding set of instructions in which the pursuit of pleasure, labor, and physical exercise forms an endless loop: You have to find pleasure through work, then work out and have sex, in this order and without any break. Then repeat. It sounds like the junktime version of Churchill’s famous quip: If you are going through hell just keep going. Except now there is no exit, and if you keep going it just means there will be more hell ahead.
But the Lorem Ipsum rules of engagement could also be read differently, in the sense that the mix of pleasure, sports, and pain is so exhausting that one would rather send a proxy or dummy or Lorem Ipsum itself—to have all the sex, pain, toil, and sports on one’s behalf. Because, frankly, to keep going in this mode is just too time consuming, and, additionally, it might become slightly cumbersome to check your emails while you are doing it. So just leave it to Lorem Ipsum to take care of it on your behalf and manage your absenteeism.
Perhaps the preoccupation with stock footage, serialized stock photography of commodities, all sorts of templates for creative labor, copy and paste, aggregation, but also the fascination with corporate aesthetics and the corporation as proxy could all be seen as potentially responding to the need to be absent. All these are proxies that one can use on behalf of oneself or one’s work. Is this some sort of applied absenteeism? A sneaky boycott of constant presence? Using stock footage and templates is kind of the equivalent of periodically saying “awesome” in order to pretend one is listening to an annoying conversation while one has left behind laser-cut stand-up displays to