Boredom and Contingency, Part 1

An axiom: Enjoyment is the primary form of being in the world. It is our currency, our investment in the world. Enjoyment is inescapable; investment is necessary. Let us say that enjoyment is the necessary and inescapable motivation for all human behaviour.  We only do things because we find enjoyment in them.  When we laugh, kill, write, eat, wallow in depression, smoke, exercise, rape, make love, steal, read, starve ourselves, protest, capitulate, worship, hate Republicans or create spreadsheets, we do so because of an unconscious investment of enjoyment in some element of the situation.

This enjoyment is necessary. Yet it is not directly encountered in any given act; what we encounter is the pleasure of reading or the misery of starvation. Enjoyment is always mediated through other affects.

A second axiom: While enjoyment itself is necessary, any given object of enjoyment is absolutely contingent. Because we are invested in some situations and objects and not others, enjoyment requires a correlate: boredom. Boredom is the absence of enjoyment. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view, our focus on an object, boredom constitutes our peripheral vision.

Enjoyment is the unconscious avatar of necessity, because at any given moment it appears impossible to change our investments. Boredom, on the other hand, is the unconscious avatar of contingency because it stands as a constant reminder that our point of view and investments are changeable. Objects of enjoyment are wholly fungible.

Yet, enjoyment and boredom are not absolutely symmetrical. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view and is framed by boredom, they are not simply correlates. Boredom is different from enjoyment in two ways: one quantitative, the other qualitative.

Quantitatively, it is easy to see how we are uninvested in and therefore bored by the greater part of the world. We enjoy elements of a situation, often and sadly enough the minimum number of elements required in order to maintain the situation. The rest sinks beneath our vision. Objects of enjoyment are a drop in the ocean of unnoticed objects.

Qualitatively, if we accept the idea that contingency is the proper name of being, then non-investment is not only the condition of enjoyment, it also completely undermines it. The world does not maintain an a priori ratio between contingency and necessity; contingency must be the a priori truth, while necessity is an a posteriori fiction.

In Part 2, Zizek's essay "Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?"