Wars Have Got Boring: The Affect of Watching Everything All the Time

Martin Heidegger deemed boredom as the mood of the twentieth century. Polysemic, yet quintessentially affective, boredom is a complex and conflicting experience of different types of emotions. A mix of hope, resolve, exhaustion and melancholia, happening all at once, all the time which can be ascribed to ceaseless mediation and the banalization of the spectacle. Ever since the detonation of the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the conception of absolute annihilation has been encapsulated in images, rendering it palpable and consumable for all. The unending devastation of the unfortunate ‘other’- the non-European, colonized, marginalized, post/de-colonial, or occupied- has become the accepted norm, and as a result, tediously mundane. The daily ordeal of the ‘other’ does not arise from a visual fabrication rooted in the value or sentiment derived from photographs, news broadcasts, or tweets. Instead, it is a gradual and ordinary experience of oppression lodged into everyday life. This article will attempt to comment on how advanced technologies that underpin this ‘Age of Industrial Complexes’ have engendered the contemporary psychological terrains where daily tribulations scrutinize the network of our historical contexts. For the internally fractured posthuman subjects inhabiting today’s technologically mediated world, the crux of the matter pertains to the myriad facets of daily life in its diverse forms, locations, and fragments. Additionally, it pertains to the framework of sensory perception upon which these experiences are both constructed and dismantled. The objective is to scrutinize the unhurried and tedious processes involved in unveiling the perpetually destabilized presents that constitute our contemporary reality.