The Hegemony of the Interesting

Let my interests be made visible from the beginning: I don't consider myself very interesting. Whenever I read that famous Socratic dictum 'the unexamined life is not worth living', my heart leaps like a puppy that hears the the shake of the chain and falsely infers the promise of a walk - when the owner was just gearing up for some s and m all along. 'Know thyself'. Timeless classical wisdom! Introspection IS the mother of virtue! I swallow these nuggets to the letter, on the assumption - which really should have done itself a favour and self-erased by now - that something 'interesting' will emerge. But when I turn inward, all I see is a young boy on a comfortable couch, playstation controller in hand, thanking his mother for the orange juice, locking his eyes on mine, and robotically addressing me: 'C'mon Tom. You know me. Move along. There's nothing to see here.'

Once upon a time I fantasised about the possibilities of total renunciation, total reclusion. I thought the protagonist of Into the Wild embodied a pin-up myth of generation and demographic: absolute self-sufficiency. Imagine: giving it all up to be at one with nature, in the company of a beaver, the odd salmon, and a full circus of thoughts. Phwoah, the thoughts I'd have! I'd spend half the day deciding whether or not to eat that ambiguously coloured berry, half the day rethinking the institutions of literary criticism. No distractions. No interference. Just me and my world-altering movements of mind.

Since then - whenever then was - I've substantially revised my model of the solipsistic utopia. First of all, given the current frequency and frequent currency of the thought 'Hmm, think I'll have some cheese on toast again', if withdrawn to remotest Alaska, I would most certainly be thinking about the berry much more than the institutions of literary criticism. How about if I raised the bar a little and dwelled in a cottage with unlimited heat, food, other necessities? With the basics guaranteed, would I not be free to think on matters of far greater consequence? Wittgenstein solved philosophy (debatable, but let's run with it for now) on the fringes of Europe, holed up on a Fjord, with little more than pen and paper at his disposal. My mathematician friend daily violates the law of conservation of energy and produces something out of nothing. Given such paradigms, why doubt that solitude reigns as the solid precondition for creativity?

But a doubter I am. And partly because a Wittgenstein, I am not. I prefer to think of my brain in its present state as a Mac (or to be honest, a clunky underperforming PC) with an infinitesimally small hard drive. I divide the labour with my technological partner (a real Mac) according to what we do best. The real Mac acts as the external hard drive to my mind: I connect them and the data is accessible, as long as the cord remains. Every time I need to write something, I read over the notes made on and belonging to the Mac, and I sink beneath the dependency of memory. Very little is stored up here any more; and what is stored is compressed into a kind of zip file which requires a supplementary engine to be read. I no longer recall from scratch; I recognise from prompt. Same goes for what should be the 'objects' of my study, the texts I should know back to front. But until I have something in front of me, until I see the words on the page and the memories sharpen up a crisper universe, nothing happens. No matter how many times I've read the text, without the text's presence: nothing happens.

Self-sufficiency thus always strikes me as a howling oxymoron, whether at work or at play. When there's a whole world of other things and other selves out there, I can't help being struck by how gallingly insufficient the self is. Not just insufficient, but deeply, simply, boring. The opposite of interesting.

You won't be interested to know that I've been thinking (with the aid of my Mac) about the dominance of the 'interesting', particularly in academia, but also everywhere else. How long has this term been floating about as the ultimate goal? Everyone around me strives to produce interesting opinions, have interesting conversations, absorb interesting information; work out five year plans of cultural capital investment which will yield a more interesting person, plus interest. I read a book once (which, needless to say, interested me greatly) called Interpretation and Overinterpretation, and a polemic essay by a leader of the pragmatists ran something like: we shouldn't worry about what we can and can't say in criticism, enough of laws and limits. We can say whatever we like - as long as it's interesting. Other contributors in the book took issue with the ill-defined concept of 'interesting'; but it struck me as an extreme, and extremely accurate, transcription of the thick air of interest around us. 'Interestingness' rests smugly on the analyst's couch, yawning out loud, a pina colada in hand. We sit upright in the analyst's chair, our skin tensed and pencil at the ready. We know we have to listen to interestingness, because it's bound to say something interesting. Interestingness and interestingness alone is the thing that will pique our interest, the only worthy criterion for investigation.

To whose interests are we pandering when we try to be interesting? In the cutthroat world of academia, patterns of interest make or break careers. Interest someone whose interests are similar to yours, and you might just have a job. Fail to interest and the jig is up. Even if we try to go out on a limb and pursue what is interesting to us, and us alone, we play with other players, because our interests have always been set by the agendas of other people's interests. It takes a real visionary to buck the trends and define new areas of interest. And when this happens - Jesus Almighty, it's interesting!

As you can see, I don't have anything particularly interesting to say on the topic of interestingness apart from the fact that I deem it worth thinking about. Yes, interesting. But I'm also going to conclude by making the profoundly uninteresting move that I make in near every post, and contradict myself. As I become increasingly exhausted by the quest for novelty involved in leading an interesting life among interesting people, I become increasingly attracted to the boring. Boredom: that precious, ever shrinking resource in an overstimulated and overinterested life. That's why the puppy heart is going to keep jumping every time I recall - no, recognise - 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. I'll keep turning inwards, surveying the cacti and tumbleweeds, logging off, shutting down, never getting anywhere. And if I shake the shackles of the interesting, even for a few seconds: that's gonna be exciting.