Three intensities emerge out of nineteenth-century visual culture in the U.S.: speed, the accelerated pace of everyday life due to an increased connectedness; modality, the truth-value of images: what images can be trusted, which are real and authentic; attention, the degree to which a spectator can make something coherent: order out of chaos. These intensities exist on a continuum, ranging from slow to fast, false to true, inattentive to attentive. A continuum is a handy way of saying that that the boundaries between slow and fast, false and true, inattentive and attentive are opaque. Life is not slow in a tribal village. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan used the term "global village" to describe the accelerated pace of life brought about by globalizing media. We, the cosmos, have become a highly condensed village not a geographically disparate set of cities. Cross-cultural relations intersect at a high rate sometimes increasing homogeneity (McDonaldization) and sometimes increasing heterogeneity (the fusion restaurant). The difference between spirituality and machine--as in the techno-Buddah above--blurs as intensive relations (speed, modality, attention) transform the objects of our spiritual-machinic umweldt. The accelerated pace of daily life and increased connectivity brought about by mechanisms of speed (the train, the telegraph, the printing press) push our cultural systems into time-space compression, a process, David Harvey explains, that "brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time” (300)." Speed becomes the precondition for modern spatial conditions. The insularity of the familial home from the exogenous world of production, commerce, and commodities directly results from the pace of capitalist processes demanded by the production line, the call center, the consumer-driven media. Home as heart and hearth becomes separate from business so that it becomes the business: work hard, at the pace of capital, to earn a home adorned with all the signifiers of middle-class life.
Home becomes the site of authenticity, where real life happens. Intensifying modality, now from real to hyperreal--have you ever seen a magazine photo of food or food network TV show that does not use hypersaturated color?--pushes our image systems into the simulacrum, the place where image supersedes realty (Jean Baudrillard's precession of simulacra).
Work, on the other hand, requires attention. It requires increasing worker's attention, whether through Fordist models of productivity (long hours on the assembly line) or through Silicon Valley's institutionalized yoga classes. All strategies impose a mode of attention.
But home and work, in a world of intensities, are not separate spheres. Work and home, to quote Jonathan Crary, exist on a continuum--a "single surface of affect" (6)--in which one involves the intensification of authenticity and the other involves the intensification of the inauthentic life. What about working from home? Ask anyone who works form home and they will tell you that in order to be successful, they still need to maintain a strict time table, a certain composure that separates home-stuff from work-stuff. Admittedly, when working form home the authentic and inauthentic have been intensified so much that a new phase emerges: the phase Zizek calls the chocolate laxitive, where you can have your cake and eat it too. (The very substance that gives you constipation also prevents you from having it). The fallout of this new phase are unclear. Perhaps it is akin to the TV series Weeds, housewives turned drug dealers. Perhaps this image is only what we would like to see. Another image produced for and by the mainstream. Look elsewhere: working from home has a long history among the working class, selling food from the home. Two dreams, one grown from the wealth of suburbia and the other from the material demands of everyday life. Some boundaries remain clear.
