Interesting and the Interested
this starts out boring, has a good line about .75 of the way down, and peters out
A book, a film, a tree, a painting is read, and it's 'interesting'. 'Interesting' doesn't let on what has been happening in the reading. Something interested you: you were less attentive to other things in that moment, but you weren't riled, seduced, offended, coerced, mocked, seen, lauded, or gripped. Something's being interesting eats up energy and time, so that in the end there is less of these things left. This can only be defensible if what might otherwise have been done with that energy and time is harmful, or a greater wastage than that original. So 'interesting' as a word of praise signals that something has been avoided or displaced. When we say a thing is 'interesting' it often means it has made us disinterested, severed from urgency.
To think about reading or thinking or watching or listening like this is to be strictly exclusivist with one's idea of time: either one thing occurs, or another occurs. While your book was 'interesting', you did not do this. If 'interesting' is a good thing to you, then you are probably pessimistic about what this is. Instead of walking into the next room and disturbing your flatmate, you read. You didn't book a ticket for a plane journey. You didn't plot a fascist insurgency. If 'interesting' is a bad word for you, you might think that you were distracted from the good work: revolution, care, food preparation, stretching, hand-washing.
These days no one seriously thinks that any moment you spend not contributing to a good cause is a moment wasted. The period in which everything that people liked was seen as a tool for keeping the grotesque show on the bumpy road must surely now be the past. We understand that there are plenty of people for whom a period of respite in the merely interesting is not only justified but deserved, and who cannot be held responsible for doing the good work. But equally we understand that for those who might be doing the good work exhaustion is also real. Transformation is aided by periods of exhalation. 'Interesting' things provide apparently disinterested comfort, which must not be understood as escape, just as a dog is not a small wolf.
A book is read, and it is 'interesting': the reader learns how to be interested. I am not speaking of attention. If we learn attention through art (other products are available), the thinking goes, we can be more ethically responsive. But being interested is not the same as being attentive. I am not merely ethically responsive, I have an interest in that which I see. It makes claims upon me, I want things to work out well. In being interested by a book, I want it to keep interesting me, for my evaluation of it to hold out. I want the book or the thing to be equal to my hopes for it.
Interesting things teach us to be interested, and this only can be the reason for their condemnation. For who is it who needs more interests? Interlocking mechanisms of injustice hurt and silence those whose skin colour, sense of self, religion, and other characteristics are not tolerated by those who wield power. It is outrageous to ask hurt and silenced peoples to train up their capacity to be interested in themselves. Even if one is in the murderously fortunate position of being able to float along unmolested, it is difficult not to be interested in two degrees of warming (unless perhaps one is a member of the slowly growing band of climate-privateers for whom the obliteration of human and other lives shores up their particularly pure form of utopian enterprise theory).
Interesting things are not suspect because they are ideology, opium, distraction, or vague, but because only the tin-eared professoriate could ever believe that more people need to be interested in things. Being interested is not the same as being disinterested, and to be interested one does not need look for the interesting. Not-doing is not the same as doing, and learning-to-do does not arise from not-learning-to-do.