The Culture of Boredom [1 ed.] 9789004427495, 9789004427228

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The Culture of Boredom

Critical Studies General Editor Myriam Diocaretz

VOLUME 40

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​crst

The Culture of Boredom Edited by

Josefa Ros Velasco

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: A Familiar Piece of Graffiti. Quinn Dombrowski. March 19, 2010. Photography. Creative Commons ShareAlike License Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ros Velasco, Josefa, 1987- editor. Title: The culture of boredom / edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, 2020. | Series: Critical studies, 0923-411X ; volume 40 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The Culture of Boredom was born in fall 2017, when the outstanding national and international specialists in Boredom Studies, from a variety of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, comparative literature, and aesthetics, to name a few, and including myself, started discussing the importance of research and work together to move forward the study of boredom as a modern phenomenon, traditionally approached by sociologists and philosophers, by involving new discourses on modern boredom from literature and art as well as from sociology and philosophy, in order to throw light on the holistic comprehension of boredom beyond psychology”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020005890 | ISBN 9789004427228 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004427495 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Boredom. | Boredom in literature. Classification: LCC BF575.B67 C85 2929 | DDC 302/.17–dc23 LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2020005890​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0923-​4 11X isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 2722-​8 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 2749-​5 (e-​book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations vii Abbreviations viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: Humanities Still Have a Say in Boredom Studies 1 Josefa Ros Velasco

Part 1 Boredom and Society 1

Boredom and the Disciplinary Imaginary 23 Elizabeth S. Goodstein

2

The Multitude Strikes Back? Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism 55 Michael E. Gardiner

3

Boredom: a Political Issue 76 George García Quesada

4

About Boredom: Hermeneutic Looks and Existential Analysis in Modernity 91 Juan Diego Hernández Albarracín and Carlos Fernando Álvarez González

5

Too Much Time: Changing Conceptions of Boredom, Progress, and the Future among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia, 2003–​2015 113 Daniel Mains

Part 2 Boredom and Literature 6

Immersed in Boredom: the Architecture of Brisbane in Johnno 135 Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán

vi Contents 7

The Presence of Literature: Georg Büchner’s Comedy Leonce und Lena 152 Wolfram Malte Fues

8

Upper-​Class Female Boredom in Marriage in 19th-​Century Western Literature as a Manifestation of Socio-​Cultural Pressures 187 Josefa Ros Velasco and Nancy Provolt

9

Men Walking into Woods. Boredom, Nihilism, and the Characters of Erlend Loe 202 Martin Demant Frederiksen

Part 3 Boredom and Creativity 10

The Art of Boring (Oneself) 217 Jorge Andrés Espinoza Cáceres

11

Perfect Boredom: From Disillusion to Creativity 236 Sergio Velasco Caballero

12

A Cartography of Boredom: Reading for Affectivity in Contemporary Poetry 257 Kristiine Kikas

13

Boredom and Institutional Critique 273 Judy Freya Sibayan



Postface: Rhymed Reflections on Boredom 293 Francisco Cardoso Gomes de Matos



Index 299

Illustrations 1.1 6.1

Detail from Danckert and Merrifield (2018, Fig. 3, partial, courtesy of James Danckert). 38 Brisbane from the air, December 1957 (Queensland State Archives. Item ID436402, Photographic material, 2609x1665). Public domain. 149

Abbreviations acla bold bpd camp cchs-​c sic

ccp csa daad dla dlsu dsm edsa fMRI fpu gdp IC inif-​u cr laws MoMO pac rcc rll sgn tomb ucla ucm ufpe who zktf

(American Comparative Literature Association) (Blood Oxygen Level-​dependent) (Borderline Personality Disorder) (Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines) (Center for Human and Social Sciences—​Higher Council for Scientific Research [Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales—​Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas]) (Cultural Center of the Philippines) (Central Statistical Authority) (German Academic Program of Exchange [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst]) (Archive of German Literature [Deutsches Literatur-​Archiv Marbach]) (De la Salle University) (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (Epiphany of the Saints Ave [Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in the current Metro Manila map terminology]) (Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional mri) (University Faculty Training program [Programa de Formación del ­Profesorado Universitario del Ministerio de España]) (Gross Domestic Product) (Institutional Critique) (Institute of Philosophical Research—​University of Costa Rica [­Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Filosóficas—​Universidad de Costa Rica]) (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems) (Museum of Mental Objects) (Performance Art Consultancy) (Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard) (Romance Languages and Literatures) (Scapular Gallery Nomad) (The Other Manila Biennale) (The University of Los Angeles in California) (Complutense University of Madrid [Universidad Complutense de ­Madrid]) (Federal University of Pernambuco [Universidade Federal de ­Pernambuco]) (World Health Organization) (Center for Culture and Technical Research [Zentrum für Kultur und Technikforschung at Stuttgart Universität])

Notes on Contributors Carlos Fernando Álvarez González is a philosopher at the Industrial University of Santander, Colombia. Ph.D. in Humanistic Research (University of Oviedo, Spain). M.A.  in Bioethics (El Bosque University, Colombia). He is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pamplona, Colombia, specialized in Kantian and Heideggerian philosophy and the relationship between technology and tragedy. He is also responsible for the module of Epistemology (M.A.  in Education, University Simón Bolívar). He was Professor at University Simón Bolívar and the Free University of Colombia, teaching social anthropology, bioethics, technoscience, and hermeneutics. Dr.  Álvarez González is the author of papers such as “Analysis of the Structure and the Organization of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (laws) from the Reading of Arnold Pacey” (2017) and “Angst, Knowledge Principle of Possibility” (2016), among many others. Francisco Cardoso Gomes de Matos was born in Crato, Ceará, Brazil. A long-​time resident of Recife, northeastern Brazil, he has Bachelor’s degrees in Languages and Law (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco), M.A. in Linguistics (University of Michigan), and Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (Catholic University of São Paulo). An Emeritus Professor of Linguistics (ufpe), Gomes de Matos is president of the Board, aba Global Education, Recife. He was a Visiting Professor/​Scholar at the Universities of Georgia, Ottawa, Texas (Austin), and the Museo de Antropología, Mexico. Author of several pioneering global pleas: “For a Language Rights Declaration” (1984), “For Communicative Peace” (1993), “For the Linguistic Rights of the Elderly” (2015). He has published in Portuguese and English. Among his publications, we find the books Nurturing Nonkilling: A Poetic Plantation (Center for Global Nonkilling, 2009), Dignity. A Multidimensional View (Dignity Press, 2013), and the e-​book Rhymed Reflections. A Forest of Ideas/​Ideals (aba Books, 2017). Jorge Andrés Espinoza Cáceres B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chile (2011), and M.A. in Contemporary Thought at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago (2016). Researcher and curator of art. Specialized in the areas of Modern and Contemporary Aesthetics, German Philosophical Hermeneutics, and Hermeneutics of Latin American Art. Teacher for the areas of Aesthetics and Hermeneutics of Art for the Departmental Institute of Fine Arts, and seminarian for the Museum of Tertulia, Cali, Colombia.

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Martin Demant Frederiksen holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and is currently a research fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He has conducted long-​term ethnographic fieldwork in The Republic of Georgia, Bulgaria, and Croatia and published on issues such as urban planning, youth, crime, temporality, and ethnographic writing. He is the author of Young Men, Time and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (Temple University Press, 2013), Georgian Portraits: Essays on the Afterlives of a Revolution (Zero Books, 2017), and An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular (Zero Books, 2018) and well as many academic papers. Wolfram Malte Fues was born in 1944 in Bremen/​Germany. He studied German Literature, Philosophy, History, and European Folktales at the University of Zurich. He got his Ph.D. in 1978 and his Habilitation in 1987 at the University of Basel. From 1992 till 2003, he founded and managed the interdisciplinary project Cultural History of the Sciences. From 1994 to 2011, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Basel. He made Chair-​substitutions in Zurich, and Frankfurt am Main, lectures in Antwerpen, Basel, Bayreuth, Berlin, Bremen, Bristol, Hamburg, Halle, Ithaca, Jena, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Leiden, Leipzig, Regensburg, Sils-​Maria, Strassburg, Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Vancouver, Weimar, and Zurich. Dr.  Fues is the author of books and essays on Meister Eckhart, the German novel from the Enlightenment till Today, the gender-​discourse in the German Enlightenment, classical and modern aesthetics, postmodernism, new media, and theory of sciences. His work on boredom includes titles such as “Die ­Entdeckung der Langeweile. Georg Büchners Komödie Léonce und Lena” [“The Discovery of Boredom. Georg Büchner’s Comedy Leonce and Lena”] (Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 1992). George García Quesada is a philosopher and a Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Costa Rica since 2000. He is also a researcher at the Institute of Philosophical Research (inif-​u cr), and Director of the Journal of Philosophy of the University of Costa Rica. Among others, he has written books about Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life and a Marxist historical interpretation of the emergence of the middle class in Costa Rica in the first half of the 20th century (Aquileo J. Echeverría National Award in History, 2014). He was also granted the Prize Jorge Volio of Essay in Philosophy with his book Las sombras de la modernidad [Modernity Shadows] (2003). His forthcoming book (in Brill’s

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Historical Materialism series) examines and systematizes Marx’s conception of history through the categories of social space and social time. Michael E. Gardiner is Professor of Sociology at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research interests include the political economy of affect, everyday life, and utopianism. Gardiner is author of several books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. His latest book is Weak Messianism: Studies in Everyday Utopianism (2013). Gardiner’s works on boredom are quoted worldwide and include titles such as: “Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Sociology of Boredom’ ” (Theory, Culture & Society, 2012), Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives (co-​edited with Julian Jason Haladyn) (Taylor & Francis, 2017), and “A Tale of Two ’68s: The ‘Politics of Boredom’ in France and Italy” (Cultural Politics, 2019). Elizabeth S. Goodstein is a Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Emory University; she is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature, History, and Philosophy. She is the author of Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity and Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, both Stanford University Press. Juan Diego Hernández Albarracín is a social communicator at the University of Pamplona, Colombia. M.A. in Philosophy (Industrial University of Santander, Bucaramanga) with a dissertation entitled Boredom and Modernity. A  dialogue between philosophy and cinema in our current condition. Ph.D. candidate in Educational Sciences (University Simón Bolívar, Barranquilla). Head of Pedagogy and Professor of Epistemology and Research. M.A. in Education and Administrative Law (University Simón Bolívar, Cúcuta). Professor of Philosophy of Communication, Hermeneutics, and Ethnography since 2012 (University of Pamplona, Colombia). He is the author of papers such as “Boredom and Poetry: Reviewing the Work of Alejandra Pizarnik since Martin Heidegger’s Understanding of Boredom (Langeweile)” (Revista Filosofía uis, 2012). He is the editor of the book Contemporary Pedagogies: Diverging Glance at School (Simón Bolívar University Press, forthcoming). Kristiine Kikas holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Semiotics (Tallinn University, 2015). In 2016 her Master’s Thesis—​Reading Sensation in John Burnside’s Poetry—​was awarded the President Lennart Meri Prize. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tallinn University, Estonia, she attempts to develop a

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method for the non-​representational reading of poetry. Kristiine’s main areas of interest are contemporary poetry, theories of affect, and radical empiricism. Besides teaching English, she coordinates the creative writing course at the summer school of Tallinn University. Daniel Mains is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Ph.D. in Anthropology (Emory University, Georgia), M.A. in Anthropology (Emory University), and B.S. in Philosophy (Lewis & Clark College, Oregon). His research and writing explore the intersection between culture and economics in urban Africa. He is interested in Ethiopia, urban infrastructure, youth cultures, capitalism, and international development. He is the author of Hope is Cut:  Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia (Temple University Press, 2012). Hope is Cut examines how young men in urban Ethiopia negotiate the gap between their desires for the future and economic realities. Dr. Mains was a Fulbright Fellow in Hawassa, Ethiopia (2013–​2014), and a Humboldt Fellow in Berlin, Germany (2017–​2018). He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the politics of infrastructure that is tentatively titled Under Construction:  Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia. His research on boredom has been published in works such as “Neoliberal Times: Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia” (American Ethnologist, 2007). Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán is an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at San Francisco de Quito University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and an M.A. in the Histories and Theories program from the Architectural Association. In 2014 he was a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 2011 a Visiting Ph.D. Student at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His research focuses on the relationship between architecture and conditions of boredom and sameness, as components of the modern built environment. Nancy Provolt is an online course designer, contributing author, and instructor for universities across the United States such as the University of North Carolina Charlotte (Women’s and Gender Studies Program; Program of American Studies), the University of Louisville (Women’s and Gender Studies), the Eastern Michigan University (Women’s and Gender Studies), or the University of Mississippi (Gender Studies), as well as the College of New Jersey (Gender Studies). She

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earned a B.S. in Women and Gender Studies, and an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies (Eastern Michigan University). Provolt received numerous awards for academic excellence, as well as Certificates in Nonprofit Management and Entrepreneurship. Her areas of specialization are gender and poverty, gender and sexuality, ecofeminism, American studies, and gender and culture. Her research interests are poverty and the impact of gender equality, education, and that of social expectations in generational poverty as well as the impact of loneliness and isolation within specific communities. Nancy has spent the past 11 years working with various universities to add to their curriculum of Gender Studies, Sociology, and American Studies. She is a contributing author to Feminism: Past, Present and Future Perspectives (Nova Science, 2017), and she has recently presented research on boredom and literature and is working on a project exploring the impact of boredom and loneliness on the elderly as well as populations facing isolation due to chronic health conditions. Judy Freya Sibayan is a conceptual artist and an independent curator based in Manila. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from De La Salle University, Philippines, where she taught for three decades. She retired from dlsu as a Full Professor in 2013. Sibayan is the author of the e-​book The Hypertext of HerMe(s), her autobiography published by KT Press (London) in 2014 with a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She is a co-​founding editor and publisher of the online Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art. Sibayan has a 44-​ year history of solo and group exhibitions, both local and international. Her body of work for the past two decades has focused mainly on the work of Institutional Critique. She is currently the curator of the Museum of Mental Objects (MoMO). Former director of the erstwhile Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines (1987–​1989). She is the recipient of the Patnubay ng Sining para sa Bagong Pamamaraan Award given by the City of Manila in 2006. Moreover, Sibayan was awarded the 13 Artist Award/​Grant given by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1976. Her work on boredom includes the title “Art and Boredom” (ideya: Journal of Humanities, 2000). Josefa Ros Velasco is an Associate and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow. She is conducting multidisciplinary research on the evolution of the understanding of boredom as a mental pathology. As part of this approach, she is examining how the comprehension of boredom in terms of mental disease has gradually formed over time by paying attention

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to philosophical, theological, and literary narratives. Dr. Ros Velasco holds a Ph.D.  in  Philosophy with International Mention at the Excellent Program of Doctorate in Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid (ucm, Spain), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education. Her Dissertation was entitled Boredom as a Selective Pressure in Hans Blumenberg, with which she got the Extraordinary Doctorate Award (2016–​2017), M.A. in Contemporary Thinking, and M.A. in Teachers Training. Ros Velasco was visiting researcher at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur-​und Technikforschung at Stuttgart Universität (izkt, Germany) as a daad (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholar, and at the Deutsches Literatur-​Archiv Marbach (dla, Germany) as a dla fellow. She is a member of the Research Groups Saavedra Fajardo Library for Hispanic Political Thought at the ucm; History and Video Games at the University of Murcia; and History and Philosophy of Emotions at cchs-​c sic. She is the editor and the author of academic papers such as “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom” (Karl Alber, 2018), “Boredom:  Humanising or Dehumanising Treatment” (Vernon, 2018); or “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (Thémata, 2017), and books such as La enfermedad del aburrimiento. El camino de la medicalización y sus alternativas [The Illness of Boredom. The Path toward Medicalization and its Alternatives] (forthcoming), Boredom Is in Your Mind (Springer, 2019), and The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2020). Sergio Velasco Caballero holds a Ph.D. in Art: Production and Research (Polytechnic University of Valencia, 2017), M.A.  in Artistic Production:  Specialization in Contemporary Thought and Visual Culture (Polytechnic University of Valencia, 2012), and B.A. in Fine Arts (Polytechnic University of Valencia, 2011). He was Superior Technician in Research at the Department of Sculpture at Polytechnic University of Valencia from 2014 to 2017 and Fellow with Excellence Award at the same institution from 2012 to 2013. Dr. Velasco Caballero is a member of the I+D projects Recuperación de prácticas pioneras del arte de acción de la vanguardia histórica española y su contribución a la historia de la performance europea (HAR2014-​58869-​P), and Recuperación de obras pioneras del arte sonoro de la vanguardia histórica española y revisión de su influencia actual (HAR2008-​ 04687/​ARTE). He took part in the scientific committee of meetings such as III Congreso Internacional de Investigación en Artes Visuales: Glocal [codificar, mediar, transformar, vivir] (2017), and II Congreso Internacional de Investigación en Artes Visuales: Real /​Virtual (2013). His dissertation was entitled El tiempo a secas. Estudio sobre las posibilidades creativas del aburrimiento aplicadas a

newgenprepdf

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la creación artística [Just Time: Study on the Creative Possibilities of Boredom in Artistic Practice]. Velasco Caballero is the author of the paper “Saltos apáticos. Primeros pasos para la integración performativa del aburrimiento en la vanguardia histórica española” [“Apathetic Leaps: The Protoperformative Integration of Boredom in the Spanish Historical Avant-​garde”] (2018).

introduction

Humanities Still Have a Say in Boredom Studies Josefa Ros Velasco Abstract The Culture of Boredom was born in fall 2017, when the outstanding national and international specialists in Boredom Studies, from a variety of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, comparative literature, and aesthetics, to name a few, and including myself, started discussing the importance of research and work together to move forward the study of boredom as a modern phenomenon, traditionally approached by sociologists and philosophers, by involving new discourses on modern boredom from literature and art as well as from sociology and philosophy, in order to throw light on the holistic comprehension of boredom beyond psychology.

Keywords art  –​ boredom  –​ culture  –​ humanities  –​ literature  –​ mental health  –​ modernity  –​ ­sociology

The study of boredom is nowadays in a paradoxical situation that makes understanding it a tough task. As it stands, researchers consistently decry the paucity of the existing literature on boredom and a perceived lack of interest among scholars in this topic. Experts point out to both axes as the reasons why it remains impossible to understand what is boredom. As a result, researchers agree that the study of boredom is in its infancy and has not been paid the attention deserved (O’Hanlon, 1981; Damrad-​Frye and Laird, 1989; Fisher, 1991; Vodanovich and Watt, 1999; Vodanovich, 2003; Martin, Sadlo, and Stew, 2006; Pekrun et al., 2010). Because of this, “the scientific study of boredom remains a relatively obscure niche and boredom itself is still poorly understood,” as John Eastwood et al. state (2012, p. 483). Is it possible that we are, almost a century later, in the same situation that Bertrand Russell reported in The Conquest of Happiness (1930)? The short answer to this question is ‘no.’ A more detailed one leads us to analyze the amount of research devoted to the phenomenon of boredom. As

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_002

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I have previously—​and empirically—​demonstrated in my work “Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs” (2017), the emotion of boredom has attracted the researchers’ attention for centuries. After the efforts of authors like Siegfried Wenzel (1961; 1966; 1967), Reinhard Kuhn (1976), or Peter Toohey (1987; 1988; 1990; 2004; 2011a) to demonstrate that boredom was part of the daily lives of the ancient and medieval peoples, and taking into account those of Patricia Meyer Spacks (1995), or Lars Svendsen (2005, p. 11) to explain, on the contrary, that “boredom has only been a central cultural phenomenon for a couple of centuries,” we have to admit that we are talking about an exciting and old emotion. Perhaps so old that some thinkers have suggested that it was the “metaphysical principle of the world” (Blumenberg, 2011, p.  529, a. trans.), the Gods’ most common mood (Nietzsche, 2006), and the Gods’ reason for our creation (Kierkegaard, 1987). The issue with boredom is neither one of a literature shortage nor a lack of interest. Boredom has been considered the punishment of the entire humanity throughout history. The ancients understood it as a shameful emotion resulting from the lack of dedication to the public affairs (Leslie, 2009); in the Middle Ages it became a sin between the walls of the monasteries under the names of ‘acedia’ or ‘demon of noontide’ (Saint Augustine, 1960; Ponticus, 1972; Cassian, 2000; Saint Gregory, 2014; or Saint Thomas, 2017, to name a few); and the modernity made of it the correlate of the rationalized time (Simmel, 1964; Weber, 1978; 2002), the pre-​planned entertainment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007), and the existential feeling of angst (Durkheim, 1966) and nonsense (Sartre, 1991; 1993; 2013). The phenomenon of boredom was traditionally addressed from its socio-​cultural condition by philosophers and theologians. However, during the 19th century, boredom was depicted as a disease, metaphorically speaking, by the European writers who found precisely in writing the remedy against boredom. It was later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the metaphor of boredom as a disease was taken at face value, in the context of the psychological and psychiatric studies, that such a common annoyance became confusing by being stripped of its historical background. Before the last century, it was not published almost any treatise on boredom as a medical condition, except for those linking boredom to another well-​known affection, i.e., melancholy (Burton, 2001). However, over the last hundred years, the study of boredom has been mainly carried out by the mental health specialists (Ros Velasco, 2017; 2018a, b) who have been spreading the idea that boredom concerns the individual mind, involving serious psychosocial consequences (Eastwood et al., 2012; German and Latkin, 2012; see also Bergler, 1945). Since then, boredom has become a matter of discussion among psychologists and psychiatrists who have published their researches by

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thousands, making of boredom even a matter of clinical interest that needs to be analyzed from its neurological and cognitive roots (Danckert and Allman, 2005; Eastwood et al., 2012). To date, the most widespread belief is that boredom arises from a discontinued relationship between the subject and the environment caused by some kind of individual disorder including, for example, the pathology of chronic boredom (Gimbel, 1975; Fisher, 1987; Todman, 2003; Toohey, 2011a; Eastwood et al., 2012). Therefore, much of the literature on boredom focuses on the proposal of boredom-​fighting strategies such as the therapies of avoidance or confrontation (Chaney and Chang, 2005; Leung, 2008; Nett, Goetz, and Daniels, 2010), the ‘aways’ strategy (Goffman, 1959), and the occupational therapy (Conrad, 1997), among many other antidotes (see also Retana, 2011). In the meantime, psychiatrists consider that boredom deserves to be treated as a common psychotic disorder like depression and stress (Butler et al., 2011) due to its neurotic implications (Bergler, 1945). Not only is boredom associated with the range of mental diseases, but also with that of dysfunctional behaviors resulting from the efforts of the patients themselves to relieve its symptoms. In this sense, boredom is considered responsible for causing depressions, anxieties, addictions to drugs, sex, and gambling, reckless driving, states of despair and loneliness, hostile and aggressive behaviors, sleep disorders, criminal actions, school deviations, suicidal tendencies, low self-​esteem, lack of social affiliation, and eating disorders, among others (see, e.g., Martin et al., 2006; Van Tilburg and Igou, 2011a, b; Vodanovich and Watt, 1999, for complete lists of behavior deviations caused by boredom). Against all the odds, the mental health specialists working on boredom continue complaining about the scarcity of knowledge so far achieved. There exists ample literature and interest in boredom, even if we pay only attention to that produced in the mental health field (Ros Velasco, 2017). We are not facing a problem of a lack of research or interest. We cannot take a stand on boredom because specialists on Boredom Studies from the mental health field do not work in a multidisciplinary fashion yet, In other words, they are not paying attention to the precedents, background, history, and the path along which boredom became an illness. Still, mental health professionals are selfish and unable to look beyond their perspectives, as the editor of the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm), Alles Frances, pointed out in his critical book Saving Normal. An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-​of-​Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-​5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (2014). As a result, they have turned daily annoyances into diseases by making wrong decisions and overstating the importance of their fieldwork (Frances, 2014) even when they admit that, at the very beginning of

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the 21st century, there is a lack of agreement on what is boredom, its cognitive implications, and neurological basis (Danckert and Allman, 2005; Eastwood et al., 2012; Merrifield, 2014) and acknowledge that the lack of assessment and measuring instruments makes it impossible for specialists to reach a real understanding of the matter (Vogel-​Walcutt et al., 2012). To sum up, instead of continually expanding the already achieved knowledge about boredom, scholars have promoted segregation from which the study of this phenomenon starts almost from scratch. Apart from being running the risk of diagnosing a ‘ghost-​disease’ to be medicalized (Ros Velasco, 2018a, b), despite the apparent limitations, this narrow way of looking at boredom usually results in the forgetfulness of the positive qualities of boredom that other disciplines have demonstrated over history. Current scholars have paid little attention to the understanding of boredom as a causal emotion that does not necessarily produce dysfunctional responses but creative behaviors. As an experience that triggers anxiety and agitation (Van Tilburg and Igou, 2011a, b)—​and, perhaps, even something close to nervousness (Fenichel, 1951)—​boredom leads to innovation. Boredom makes us feel dissatisfied with a specific situation because “when we are bored there is something of the context that we are rejecting” (Retana, 2011, p. 183) and, thereupon, drives us to seek new opportunities as a reaction to the environment. It is a symptom that instigates moments of experimentation (Moravia, 1999; Parreño Roldán, 2013), including a critical element: an expression of deep dissatisfaction (Svendsen, 2005). Boredom prevents stillness by giving way to something else. As Rossi claims (1986), the symptom is, in fact, a friend that tells oneself that it is the time for a change. Because of this lack of transversal work, the benefits of boredom have been less visible in the literature. Fortunately, some authors are still claiming that boredom is an opportunity to learn from oneself (Rule, 1998), a mechanism of anticipation, a starting point of great works (Butler et al., 2011), and a valuable art (Sloterdijk, 2009). Thinkers like Siegfried Kracauer (1995) considered being bored the only suitable option because boredom provides a kind of guarantee that one is still in control of their existence. According to Russell (1930), we must admit that a certain degree of boredom is essential to living a happy life. Another group of thinkers is stating that boredom plays a crucial role in our individual and social development by pointing out that the driving force of boredom meets an adaptive function in a purely Darwinian sense. Peter Toohey (2011a) is the leading representative of this new trend, inspired by Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman (1980) and Antonio Damasio’s (1999; 2003) premises on negative emotions. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (2011) stated that boredom meets an adaptive role in stimulating movement,

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exploration, and evolution. Blumenberg did not hesitate to claim that if we do not suffer from boredom when we are fully adapted, forcing us to be in constant motion, we would be unable to adapt to future changes. In the same vein, Blumenberg (2011) also argued that one of the biggest problems today is that mental health specialists are neglecting the importance of negative emotions like boredom. Negative emotions are understood as errors of the evolution because in our modern society health is defined as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-​being” by the who and thus “everything becomes a disease” (Blumenberg, 2011, p. 516; see also Ros Velasco, 2019). This current understanding of boredom is a consequence of not paying attention to the history of boredom and knowledge from humanities. The contributors of this volume firmly believe that boredom is not one of those realities to approach from a sole perspective or discipline. We cannot but vindicate the role of all those past and present manifestations and understandings of boredom for us to get closer to its nature. For example, literary and artistic expressions, as well as the current analysis of the modern roots of boredom, are essential to achieve a holistic comprehension of boredom. We need to work all together in a multidisciplinary way. The Culture of Boredom aims to go back to the roots of boredom and examine what the humanities said and have still to contribute to resolving the puzzle of boredom in a multidisciplinary fashion. This book project was born in fall 2017, when some outstanding specialists in Boredom Studies worldwide—​including myself—​from a variety of disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, comparative literature, aesthetics, and arts, started discussing the importance of introducing new discourses on modern and contemporary boredom from cultural, literary, and artistic viewpoints in the current paradigm of study to throw light on the holistic comprehension of boredom that scholars from mental health fields are failing to reach. I promoted such an encounter when, after finishing the Doctoral Dissertation—​focused on an interdisciplinary understanding of boredom through its historical comprehension as a mental disease—​I realized that, even though boredom was omnipresent in our modern society, there was a lack of agreement by specialists on its definition. After spending some years working hard on this hot-​button topic, taking into account the different understandings coming from those specialists who inspired me most, I knew that what it was missing was the chance of listening attentively to others beyond the mental health proposals. This book claims that we should approach boredom from a multidisciplinary perspective to fully capture it. I decided to contact those authors whose studies on boredom from a humanistic, cultural, and artistic point of view I had quoted in my Dissertation to

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promote a discussion on the state of affairs of the study of boredom. Around fifty scholars responded to my call, and fifteen engaged in a meaningful and constructive dialogue. Some of us met last March 2018 at the University of California in Los Angeles, as part of a Seminar I organized in the framework of the American Comparative Literature Association (acla) Annual Meeting, entitled “Boredom and Literature:  Cross-​Paradigmatic Research and Theorizing Approach,” to discuss, face to face, some ideas we were talking about during the last months. This contact intended to rethink the phenomenon of boredom as a creative driving force in opposition to the current conception of boredom as a mental pathology, taking into account those great works created under its influx and those different streams of thought born in its bosom. The goal was to clarify whether boredom could still be seen as a creative force, putting some examples on the table, or, on the contrary, we should consider it, as psychologists do at present, as a pathology that frequently results in deviant behaviors. Much depends on our understanding of boredom and our response to it. If we consider boredom is a creative force, we will promote boredom; if we understand it as a negative but necessary emotion, we will learn to tolerate it; if we consider boredom is the cause of our afflictions, we will condemn it, as a sin—​as the medieval peoples did—​or as a shameful emotion—​as the Ancient Greeks did—​and, finally, if we understand boredom as something related to particular personality trait, or some mental issue, we will treat and/​or medicalize it. We clarified many essential ideas during that time and called into question some other widely accepted premises. After all, we concluded: the issue of boredom is one we cannot consider from a single standpoint but a holistic approach. In this sense, humanities still have a say in Boredom Studies—​we agreed. We understood that boredom is omnipresent in our modern society precisely because of the abundance of pre-​planned responses to coping with it, even promoted through culture, literature, and art themselves. Boredom is and has been a precious and enchanting art and the starting point for great works of art and literature in the cultural scope of modernity as a response to such pre-​planned entertainment. Not only is boredom the driving force of such creations, but the common thread that runs through many pieces and literary stories. Thus, we might mention some essential literary representatives of the English disease, the Sturm und Drang or the mal du siècle. Furthermore, boredom started being an artistic subject in that time—​even earlier, with Bosch’s Table of the Mortal Sins (1505–​1510). Suffice it to mention the series Ennui by James Tissot, and the name of Walter Richard Sickert, or the pieces by John Edward Goodall and Gaston La Touche, for example (see Toohey, 2011b).

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The critical and social analysis reveals the roots of boredom but also literature and art do, like many other cultural expressions. They allow us to achieve some knowledge about boredom experiences for centuries retrospectively. Even fictional literature and abstract art, when referring to boredom, tell us something about how people suffer or suffered from boredom, how they addressed their boredom, to what was boredom attributed. Thus, the analysis and tracking of the presence of boredom in culture over time is a great exercise to know more about such a compelling emotion and its evolution, transformation, and presence. Beyond such manifestations, sufferings, and understandings of boredom, there are social, economic, and cultural reasons. Such signals are going to tell us both the reasons for being bored and how to alleviate boredom: sometimes through creativity, sometimes through eccentric and transgressive behaviors that the society may consider deviated and pathological. In the 19th century, those may be adultery and suicide; today is drug consumption, violence, or work absenteeism. Humanities teach us that the solution is not in silencing boredom, the symptom, with drugs and therapies, but in rethinking the context in which boredom appears. One viewpoint—​that from humanities—​comes in response to the unanswered questions of another, that of mental health. We know that only by working together and taking into account the different cultural manifestations in which boredom takes place, will we be able to explore boredom in depth. We all took the initiative of breaking the first lance for this purpose by giving a loud voice to our approaches to boredom from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, literature, and art—​by pulling together our efforts in one place. The Culture of Boredom attempts to demonstrate that we can read the path of our current society by paying attention to our reactions to those boring experiences to criticize the boredom-​promoting socio-​cultural structures, institutions, ways of life, and systems of beliefs. We can make it more transparent how boredom affects the current society and its socio-​cultural products, and how we perceive boredom as a result of the approximation to that phenomenon from the humanities. The Culture of Boredom comes to show boredom refreshingly by providing the most updated and original explanations and understandings of boredom concerning its social, cultural, and artistic manifestations. It is the first time that this group of specialists gathers to promote a cross-​border dialogue to overcome the recognized limitations of their respective viewpoints. We are introducing a compendium of the latest proposals, after a profound reflection, from authors whose words on boredom are reproduced from one paper to another every day (see e.g. Elizabeth S. Goodstein or Wolfram Malte Fues) and whose titles have been translated into many languages (see e.g. Michael

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E. Gardiner or Judy Freya Sibayan). Some of them are young researchers devoting their careers to the study of boredom, while others are seniors and well-​positioned authors in the field of Boredom Studies. Unusually, among the latter, some authors left behind the study of boredom some time ago, after publishing their works on this topic, and committed to reviewing their approaches just for this book. The connection between the authors and their respective chapters goes so far that we can find a review of very close literature from different ­approaches. This book involves the most original methodologies to move the study of boredom forward from its current stalemate. In this regard, it is the baseline for future research on boredom; it will improve our understanding of existing theoretical knowledge and motivate scholars on boredom to read each other and to dialogue innovatively and respectfully. Our initiative fills the knowledge gap that still exists concerning Boredom Studies in the era of multidisciplinarity. It is time to break with individualist work and start paying attention to others’ discoveries. This book is a precedent and a reference point for researchers interested in working on boredom beyond their disciplines. The Culture of Boredom is for researchers on cultural and social studies and boredom itself from a cultural and social point of view—​including philosophers, historians, cultural theorists, literature, and art experts and enthusiasts, and even artists and writers themselves. However, we hope psychologists and psychiatrists pay attention to The Culture of Boredom and listen to our claim that we need to work hand-​in-​hand. Apart from that, since boredom is a topic that everybody loves to talk about, The Culture of Boredom is not exclusively for a specialized audience. Everybody wants to know more about such a common daily annoyance and, overall, to understand their boredom to cope with it. Boredom is a topic that catches everyone’s attention. Thus, our work is for people interested in boredom academically and professionally from a wide variety of disciplines, notwithstanding those whose attention is caught by this severe but appealing topic. We divided this book into three parts focused respectively on sociological-​ philosophical, literary, and artistic approaches, all under the umbrella of cultural studies. This Introduction and a Postface accompany the project. The first part, entitled “Boredom and Society,” is for the reader to put the attention on the sociopolitical structures and phenomena of modernity that allow us to explain the flourishment of boredom nowadays: capitalism, production, existentialism, time-​space relationship, progress, technology, mass-​cultural entertainment. They are reasons for having too much time in our current societies and for people to experience boredom. This part is an attempt to create an introduction about current sociological theories of modern boredom. In this first

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part, we wanted to explain boredom from its modern cultural and social keys and roots, in which cultural expressions such as literature and art grew. The second part, “Boredom and Literature,” moves from the sociological analysis to contemporary literature to show examples of how the cultural production provides testimony of such boredom-​promoting structures during modernity. It will show the manifestations of modern boredom from such previously explained vital concepts and roots in the literature that revolve around the 19th-​ and 20th-​century works. The last part, “Boredom and Creativity,” is similar to the former but it gives voice to the artists themselves to express how the social structures that promote boredom affect the cultural and artistic production, and how they have made of boredom the starting point of their works as a mean of criticizing the modern society. In Chapter 1, entitled “Boredom and the Disciplinary Imaginary,” Elizabeth S. Goodstein (Emory University, GA)—​an expert on the modernity and modern subjectivity representations, understood, and experienced in literature and culture—​has located herself at the intersections between literary studies, critical theory, and intellectual history to introduce the framework in which we should move when studying boredom by exploring the scope for developing Boredom Studies as a (multi-​)discipline itself. She has pulled together the strategies of close textual analysis, historical interpretation, and philosophical reflection, exploring the relationship between history and identity, language, and experience from an interdisciplinary perspective to show that we need to approach boredom through a transversal perspective. Goodstein’s chapter captures the soul and purpose of this book and is the perfect starting point to forearm the readers for the journey that is about to begin. Chapter 2, “The Multitude Strikes Back? Boredom in an Age of Sociocapitalism,” by Michael E. Gardiner (University of Western Ontario, Canada), is a revision of his homonymous paper published some years ago in the journal New Formations. In this version, he discusses the phenomenon of boredom under the arguments of the so-​called ‘Autonomist’ tradition of Marxist thought to highlight how the transformations in the production processes of the overdeveloped societies promote it as well as anxiety, depression, and indifference. Some key questions here include: “is there specifically 21st-​century boredom? If so, does it retain any of the incipiently ‘resistant’ qualities that we might find in the type of boredom more characteristic of the ‘classical’ phase of Fordist capitalism? Are there qualitative changes in the situation of our body-​minds in the time-​space of ‘semiocapitalism’? Finally, how might such transformations relate to boredom, especially concerning the perpetual speed-​up in informational and semiotic flow, and ever-​tightening and accelerating circuits of capitalist valorization?” (ch., 2).

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Chapter  3, titled “Boredom:  A Political Issue,” by the philosopher George García Quesada (University of Costa Rica), examines the relationship between time and boredom in several philosophers from German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel), post-​Idealism (Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), and phenomenology (Heidegger, Sartre) to Western and contemporary Marxism (Kracauer, Adorno, Lefebvre, Jameson, etc.). This review shows how, throughout these authors, the concept of boredom oscillates “between its praise as a long time for subjective introspection and its denunciation as a symptom of alienated time” (ch., 3). This “allows us to highlight the historicity of the concepts of boredom in philosophy and their inherent political (utopian) content” (ch., 3). Finally, García Quesada draws some considerations about time, boredom, and anxiety in contemporary societies. Chapter  4, “About Boredom:  Hermeneutic Looks and Existential Analysis in Modernity,” by the social communicator Juan Diego Hernández Albarracín (University Simón Bolivar, Colombia) and the philosopher Carlos Fernando Álvarez González (University of Pamplona, Colombia), presents a philosophical view to the concept of boredom and structural modes, worked overall by Martin Heidegger in his Seminar at the University of Freiburg, during the winter semesters of 1929 and 1930, entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. “It is intended to rescue a marginal philosophical stance to the traditional positions of Heideggerian thought, being able, in the proposed hermeneutic-​ phenomenological transit, interweave his philosophical images with cinematographic narratives that enrich the real understanding of modernity” (ch., 4) and its boredom. They assume “boredom and its essence, Langweiligkeit, as the fundamental mood [Grundstimmung] of our era, allowing other mobilities of thought to study the phenomena of cultural entertainment as a symptom of the modern disease by distancing the Dasein of the meeting, interrogation, and self-​care” (ch., 4). Chapter  5 puts an end to this first set. The anthropologist Daniel Mains (The University of Oklahoma, OK) updates his homonymous “Too Much Time:  Changing Conceptions of Boredom, Progress, and the Future among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia, 2003–​2015,” published in Focaal, to explain how the overabundance of time involves boredom in our current society. He wants to explore why people usually say they have ‘too much time’ and struggle with chronic boredom. Time is a burden for people, according to his explanation, because of their failure to attain local notions of progress and achieve linear changes in their relations of reciprocity with others. Mains examines “changes in urban young men’s experiences of time and progress for 30 years to better understand the nature of boredom and modernity” (ch., 5). Despite eventually accessing employment, people continue to discuss and debate issues of

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progress and simultaneously experience “a sense of linear progress in their lives and feelings of frustration when shifts in their built environment did not translate into a more abstract sense of change” (ch., 5). Ultimately, he argues that boredom is “profoundly social” (ch., 5). In the second part, Chapter 6, “Immersed in Boredom: The Architecture of Brisbane in Johnno,” is the original contribution of the architectural theorist Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán (San Francisco de Quito University, Ecuador). It delves into David Malouf’s portrait of Brisbane as a paradoxical space that is attractive due to its boredom. According to the author of the novel, if for Dante, the city is “a place where nothing happened and where nothing would ever happen,” to Johnno, it is “the ugliest place in the world,” “the bloody arsehole of the universe” (ch., 6). Marked by World War ii, “the architecture configures a sleepy sub-​tropical town” (ch., 6). Nonetheless, this lethargic realm nourishes Johnno’s intellectualism and Dante’s daydreaming. Parreño Roldán shows how boredom constitutes a mood that provides a sense of self and place, both undesired and appealing, with multiple expressions. Through the analytical reading of the architectural and urban descriptions of the novel, this chapter examines boredom as a force behind constant movement—​physical, intellectual and emotional. Chapter  7, “The Presence of Literature:  Georg Büchner’s Comedy Leonce und Lena,” is by the German writer Wolfram Malte Fues (Basil University, Switzerland). This is an old unpublished essay the author has upgraded for this volume to analyze the decisive critique of absolutism after the Napoleonic wars, the romantic irony, and the categories necessary for political and aesthetic criticism based on the principles of the Weimarer Klassik: presence, identity, logic of systems in hierarchy, stability of meanings by unbroken mediation in history, and society. He deals with “the disintegration of traditional plots, figures, characters, opinions, and perspectives; all of this leading to a consequence of shifting, confusion, tiredness” (ch., 7), and boredom. Chapter 8, “Upper-​class Female Boredom in Marriage in 19th-​century Western Literature as a Manifestation of Socio-​cultural Pressures,” by myself and my colleague, the independent scholar and online courses designer, Nancy Provolt, will examine how the 19th-​century Western literature has bequeathed us an unprecedented testimony about the historical and sociopolitical factors that led to experience the emotion of boredom in marital relationships through social protocols and cannons imposed on women. In this context, the female figure will be vital in understanding the emotional processes that took place before and after marriage as a consequence of female social pressures and to show how they have evolved through the release of them throughout the 20th century. “Some questions we will be raising are: did past female constrictions

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fall through this process of social liberation? Are there lower levels of frustration and boredom after marriage than in the previous centuries?” (ch., 8) How do socio-​cultural structures influence female boredom in marriage and how they have evolved through institutional changes in Western? “What emotional impact does this transformation have for the future concept of marriage?” (ch., 8) Furthermore, the most important one: how can literature improve our knowledge on this matter? Chapter 9, “Men Walking into Woods. Boredom, Nihilism, and the Characters of Erlend Loe,” by Martin Demant Frederiksen (University of Oslo, Norway), is the last one of the second part. The anthropologist takes as his point of departure the work of the Norwegian novelist and film critic Erlend Loe, which provide critical views on contemporary society and “how people, often middle-​aged men, grow increasingly frustrated and bored with the schedules and routines of the modern welfare state” (ch., 9). “As a resource, the characters of several of his novels abruptly leave their daily lives and move into isolated forests to live in solitude and stillness, thus trying to escape their sensation of boredom through nothingness” (ch., 9). In this chapter, Frederiksen “mainly focuses on two novels, Doppler and Fakta om Finland [Facts about Finland] and unfold the traits and actions of the characters [he] found in these” (ch., 9) “to engage in a discussion of the relations between literature, modern society, and the concepts of nothingness, meaninglessness, and boredom” (ch., 9). Opening the last part, Chapter 10 “The Art of Boring (Oneself),” by the specialist in modern and contemporary aesthetics Jorge Andrés Espinoza Cáceres (Departmental Institute of Fine Arts, Colombia), attempts an interpretation of the sense of boredom as a fundamental possibility to be able to comprehend our relationship with the world. He demonstrates that, precisely from the assumption of a particular form of boredom, it is possible to resignify the world and, from this, to open a creative possibility between the understanding ajar from the deep of boredom and artistic creation. To this end, the interpretation of boredom will assume a hermeneutic-​phenomenological perspective, mainly, from the Heideggerian analyses contained in its course of Freiburg of 1929–​1930. In this sense, Espinoza Cáceres structures the exposition in different stages in which he goes on to review the fundamental mood of boredom and its different modalities to highlight its particular temporary dimension and its relationship with a “comprehension of the world and a possible creative mood” (ch., 10). Finally, he analyzes how art can relate to boredom not only as a creative mood but also as an invitation to be bored. Chapter 11, “Perfect Boredom: From Disillusion to Creativity,” by the expert in production and research in art, Sergio Velasco Caballero (Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain), sustains that boredom promotes emotional well-​being

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and reveals an illusory reality that pushes the limits of human consciousness. The practical outcomes from a current Internet-​based trend consisting of sharing the product of some ‘creative boredom,’ that is to say, actions or objects whose originality and stamp are qualitatively close to artistic practice proved this possibility. Velasco Caballero writes that it is crucial to understand the products of boredom under the Instantaneous Creativity point of view, a method of consultation he developed to integrate creative conflicts by paying attention to their technical/​plastic expressions. Elements or factors involved in this expression are their mentalities simultaneously and, as a result, from this consciousness, may be used immediately as resources for self-​knowledge and creative expression. His conclusion to the topic of this volume is that the products of boredom represent a natural transmutation, often reciprocally unconscious, from an illusory reality order to a creative order in which genuine technically free willingness bursts forth. Chapter  12, “A Cartography of Boredom:  Reading for Affectivity in Contemporary Poetry,” by the specialist in cultural semiotics and comparative literature Kristiine Kikas (Tallinn University, Estonia), explores both the possibilities of the reading for the sensation and sense of boredom in poetry as a non-​representational method and their ways of creating subsequent sensations. She considers words as the units of language to be the physical material of poetry, the task of which is to produce a sensation. Words do not represent things but rather produce affective experiences during an encounter between the reader and the poem. According to her proposal, alongside words, the lack of them, silence, ambiguities produced by collocation, line breaks, graphic placements—​e.g., indents and spacing—​are considered as the material of a poem that, via the reading for sensation, contribute to the expected sense of boredom in the poem. She will show it through the analysis of “Bored” by Margaret Atwood. For Chapter 13, “Boredom and Institutional Critique,” conceptual artist Judy Freya Sibayan decided to write again, after 19 years (see 2000), about art and boredom from a very personal perspective on the occasion of this volume. She read again Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995) “to come to a full understanding” (ch., 13) of her “weariness of and disengagement from much of the art being produced” (ch., 13) in her own local artworld. Sibayan’s work of Institutional Critique resulted from her “crisis of faith in art when confronted with the fact that artists are largely dependent on the demands of formal institutions and thus not having the agency to create art critical of the institution to which they belong” (ch., 13). Her “boredom with, and disinterest in much of the art produced in Manila” (ch., 13) brought her “to put into crisis the institution of art itself” (ch., 13). Developed from this

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very personal crisis is a body of work parodying the art institution as her modality of institutional critique. As a grand finale, the peace linguist Francisco Cardoso Gomes de Matos (Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil), prepared a Postface consisting of a series of “Rhymed Reflections on Boredom” the writer has created especially for this book, paying particular attention to the relationship between this emotion and psychological, social, and creative disciplines and topics in modern times. His contribution is an invitation for the reader to explore boredom and what can we do with it to come back to this initial claim of looking at the real face of boredom that cultural expressions reveal beyond its contemporary pathological understanding. The Culture of Boredom is a well-​thought-​out project in which experienced specialists have taken part to contribute to the reassessment of such a popular and widespread phenomenon as boredom. Its contributors made an effort to explain that boredom has gained new psychic and social urgency, and what are the limits of those disciplines in charge of dealing with the socio-​psychic correlates of boredom such as psychiatry and psychology. This book intends to make the reader reconsider the socio-​cultural causes of boredom in opposition or as complementary to the neurological ones, to re-​evaluate boredom as a symptom, an effect of the socio-​cultural roots of modernity, instead of relegating boredom to the psychopathological neural working explanation. In this sense, the book concludes that we can still do something positive with our boredom if we keep the focus of our attention on its critical potential. Having said this, we genuinely believe that this work makes a meaningful contribution to the field of study by both presenting a valuable synthesis of another kind of research and demonstrating a neglected approach, that coming from humanities. In this sense, The Culture of Boredom becomes an actual meeting point for future research on boredom from a critical and cultural point of view. I must say thanks to the contributors to this volume:  without them, this project would have been impossible to carry out. We all want to thank brill, and our contacts with the publisher, Christa Stevens, and the General Editor of the series Critical Studies Myriam Diocaretz. We would like to thank the American Comparative Literature Association (acla) and the University of Los Angeles in California (ucla) that held our Seminar “Boredom and Literature” in 2018, and I want to especially say thanks to all those who, whether they were later contributing a chapter to this book or not, were in Los Angeles with me—​ Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán, Kristiine Kikas, Nancy Provolt, the psychologist María Cecilia Antón (National University of Mar del Plata, Argentina), and the Ph.D. candidate Émile Lévesque-​Jalbert (Harvard University, MA). As the

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editor of The Culture of Boredom, I cannot but be grateful with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (rll) at Harvard University and the Real Colegio Complutense (rcc) at Harvard for granting me with the fellowship that made possible I made the time for completing this work. Finally, my acknowledgments are for my colleague of the Research Group Saavedra Fajardo Library for Hispanic Political Thought at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and of the Department of Philosophy and Society at ucm, Roberto Navarrete Alonso for his help in translating Chapter 6, by Wolfram Malte Fues, from German. I also have in my mind some other colleagues that always give me energies: my mentors José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Antonio Rivera García, and Alberto Fragio, among some others. Without all your support, I would not be writing these words. Apart from that, I primarily dedicate this book to my beloved sister Montse: I hope you find the way of making with your boredom something positive.

Bibliography

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Danckert, J.A., and Allman, A.-​A. (2005). Time Flies When You’re Having Fun: Temporal Estimation and the Experience of Boredom. Brain and Cognition 59 (3), pp. 236–​ 245. doi: 10.1016/​j.bandc.2005.07.002. Durkheim, É. (1966). Suicide: A Study In Sociology. New York: Free Press. Eastwood, J.D., Frischen, A., Fenske, M.J., and Smilek, D. (2012). The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (5), pp. 482–​495. doi: 10.1177/​1745691612456044. Fenichel, O. (1951). On the Psychology of Boredom. In: D. Rapaport, ed., Organization and Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 349–​361. Fisher, C.D. (1987). Boredom: Construct, Causes and Consequences. Texas: A&M University, College Station, Department of Management. Fisher, C.D. (1991). Boredom at Work: A Neglected Concept. Human Relations 46 (3), pp. 395–​417. doi: 10.1177/​001872679304600305. Frances, A. (2014). Saving Normal:  An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-​of-​Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-​5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks. Freya Sibayan, J. (2000). Art and Boredom. IDEYA:  Journal of the Humanities 1 (2), pp. 88–​98. Gardiner, M.E. (2014). The Multitude Strikes Back?: Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism. New Formations 82, pp. 29–​46. doi: 10.3898/​NeWF.82.02.2014. German, D., and Latkin, C.A. (2012). Boredom, Depressive Symptoms, and HIV Risk Behaviors Among Urban Injection Drug Users. AIDS and Behavior 16 (8), pp. 2244–​ 2250. doi: 10.1007/​s10461-​012-​0247-​5. Gimbel, G. L. (1975). The Pathology of Boredom and Sensory Deprivation. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing 16 (5), p. 12. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin. Horkheimer, M., and Adorno T.W. (2007). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Either/​Or. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Kracauer, S. (1995). The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, R. (1976). The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Leslie, I.I. (2009). From Idleness to Boredom: On the Historical Development of Modern Boredom. In: B. Dalle Pezze, and C. Salzani, eds., Essays on Boredom and Modernity, Critical Studies 31. New York: Rodopi, pp. 35–​59. Leung, L. (2008). Leisure Boredom, Sensation Seeking, Self-​esteem, and Addiction. In: E.A. Konijn, S. Utz, M. Tanis, and S.B. Barnes, eds., Mediated Interpersonal Communication. New York: Routledge, pp. 359–​381.

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Mains, D. (2017). Too Much Time: Changing Conceptions of Boredom, Progress, and the Future among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia, 2003–​2015. Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78, pp. 38–​51. doi: 10.3167/​fcl.2017.780104. Martin, M., Sadlo, G., and Stew, G. (2006). The Phenomenon of Boredom. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, pp. 193–​211. doi: 10.1191/​1478088706qrp066oa. Merrifield, C. (2014). Toward a Model of Boredom: Investigating the Psychophysiological, Cognitive, and Neural Correlates of Boredom, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo. Meyer Spacks, P. (1995). Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moravia, A. (1999). Boredom. New York: nyrb Classics. Nett, U.E., Goetz, T., and Daniels, L.M. (2010). What to Do When Feeling Bored? Students’ Strategies for Coping With Boredom. Learning and Individual Differences 20 (6), pp. 626–​638. doi: 10.1016/​j.lindif.2010.09.004. Nietzsche, F. (2006). The Antichrist. New York: Barnes & Noble. O’Hanlon, J.F. (1981). Boredom: Practical Consequences and a Theory. Acta Psychologic 49, pp. 53–​82. doi: 10.1016/​0001-​6918(81)90033-​0. Parreño Roldán, C. (2013). Aburrimiento y espacio: Experiencia, modernidad e historia [Boredom and Space: Experience, Modernity, and History]. Revista de la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Costa Rica 2 (3), pp. 1–​15. Pekrun, R., Götz, T., Daniels, L.M., Stupnisky, R.H., and Perry, R.P. (2010). Boredom in Achievement Settings: Exploring Control-​value Antecedents. Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (3), pp. 531–​549. doi: 10.1037/​a0019243. Plutchik, R., and Kellerman, H. (1980). Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, Volume 1. Theories of Emotion. New York: Academic. Ponticus, E. (1972). The Praktikos. Spencer: Cistercian Publications. Retana, C. (2011). Consideraciones acerca del aburrimiento como emoción moral [Considerations on Boredom as a Moral Emotion]. Káñina, Revista de Artes y Letras, Universidad de Costa Rica 35 (2), pp. 179–​190. Ros Velasco, J. (2017). Boredom: A Comprehensive Study of the State of Affairs. Thémata. Revista de Filosofía 56, pp. 171–​198. doi: 10.12795/​themata.2017.i56.08. Ros Velasco, J. (2018a). The Pathology of Boredom from Contemporary Psychology and Psychiatry. In: L.P. Rodríguez Suárez, ed., Patologías de la existencia: enfoques filosófico-​antropológicos. Zaragoza:  Prensas Universitarias de la Universidad de Zaragoza, pp. 87–​99. Ros Velasco, J. (2018b). Boredom:  Humanising or Dehumanising Treatment. In:  J.G. Pereira, J. Gonçalves, and V. Bizzari, eds., The Neurobiology-​Psychotherapy-​ Pharmacology Intervention Triangle:  The Need for Common Sense in 21st Century Mental Health. Wilmington: Vernon Press, Cognitive Science and Psychology Series, pp. 251–​266.

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Ros Velasco, J. (2019). Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology of Boredom. In: J. Ros Velasco, A. Fragio, and M. Philippi, eds., Metaphorologie, Anthropologie, Phänomenologie. Neue Forschungen zum Nachlass Hans Blumenbergs. Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag, pp. 91–​107. Rossi, E. (1986). The Psychobiology of Mind-​body Healing. New York: W. W. Norton. Rule, W.R. (1998). Unsqueezing the Soul:  Expanding Choices by Reframing and Redirecting Boredom. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 28 (3), pp. 327–​336. doi: 10.1023/​A:102293810. Russell, B. (1930). Boredom and Excitement. In: B. Rusell, The Conquest of Happiness. London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 57–​68. Saint Augustine. (1960). The Confessions of Saint Augustine. New York: Image Classics. Saint Gregory. (2014). Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, 1: Preface and Books 1–​5. Minnesota: Cistercian Publications. Saint John Cassian. (2000). The Institutes. New York: Newman Press of the Paulist Press. Saint Thomas. (2017). Summa Theologica. New Mexico: Stief Books. Sartre, J.-​P. (1991). The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Sartre, J.-​P. (1993). Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press. Sartre, J.-​P. (2013). Nausea. New York: New Directions. Simmel, G. (1964). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: The Free Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Inspiration. Ephemera 9 (3), pp. 242–​251. Svendsen, L. (2005). A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books. Todman, M. (2003). Boredom and Psychotic Disorders: Cognitive and Motivational Issues. Psychiatry 66 (2), pp. 146–​167. doi: 10.1521/​psyc.66.2.146.20623. Toohey, P. (1987). Plutarch, Pyrrh. 13. Glotta 65 (3/​4), pp. 199–​202. Toohey, P. (1988). Some Ancient Notions of Boredom. Illinois Classical Studies 13 (1), pp. 151–​164. Toohey, P. (1990). Acedia in Late Classical Antiquity. Illinois Classical Studies 15 (2), pp. 339–​352. Toohey, P. (2004). Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Toohey, P. (2011a). Boredom. A Lively History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Toohey, P. (2011b). You Look Bored. Slate. Accessed 07/​31/​2018. http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​arts/​culturebox/​2011/​06/​you-​look-​bored.html. Van Tilburg, W., and Igou, E. (2011a). On Boredom:  Lack of Challenge and Meaning as Distinct Boredom Experiences. Motivation and Emotion 36 (2), pp. 181–​194. doi: 10.1007/​s11031-​011-​9234-​9. Van Tilburg, W., and Igou, E. (2011b). On Boredom and Social Identity: A Programmatic Meaning-​Regulation Approach. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37 (12), pp. 1679–​1691. doi: 10.1177/​0146167211418530.

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Vodanovich, S.J. (2003). Psychometric Measures of Boredom: A Review of the Literature. The Journal of Psychology 137, pp. 569–​601. doi: 10.1080/​00223980309600636. Vodanovich, S.J., and Watt, J.D. (1999). The Relationship Between Time Structure and Boredom Proneness: An Investigation Within Two Cultures. The Journal of Social Psychology 139 (2), pp. 143–​152. doi: 10.1080/​00224549909598368. Vogel-​Walcutt, J.J., Fiorella, L., Carper, T., and Schatz, S. (2012). The Definition, Assessment, and Mitigation of State Boredom Within Educational Settings: A Comprehensive Review. Educational Psychology Review 24 (1), pp. 89–​111. doi: 10.1007/​ s10648-​011-​9182-​7. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society:  An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Classics. Wenzel, S. (1961). Petrarch’s Accidia. Studies in the Renaissance 8, pp. 36–​ 48. doi: 10.2307/​2856987. Wenzel, S. (1966). ‘Acedia’ 700–​ 1200. Traditio 22, pp. 76–​ 102. doi:  10.1017/​ S0362152900010679. Wenzel, S. (1967). The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

pa rt 1 Boredom and Society

∵

­c hapter 1

Boredom and the Disciplinary Imaginary Elizabeth S. Goodstein Abstract The current flowering of interest, scholarly and otherwise, in boredom is an index of its pervasiveness in contemporary life. The problem is not new, but it has gained new psychic and cultural urgency in a world where attention is a key commodity. In this context, the ascendance of Boredom Studies as a field is, at best, an ambiguous development. Such (quasi-​)disciplinary consolidation, itself a mode of reification, does not necessarily foster productive engagement across intellectual and institutional boundaries. While popular writing on boredom continues to recycle very tired clichés, social scientists pay little attention to the history of reflection on boredom or its genealogy in literary, philosophical, and religious traditions, and philosophers obscure boredom’s modernity by occluding its connections to the industrial-​technological transformation of everyday life. Genuinely interdisciplinary Boredom Studies has the potential to facilitate confrontation with some very significant methodological and theoretical lacunae in the ways human experience is understood and explored in the contemporary academy. But if the field is to become more than a symptom of the problem it studies, it will be necessary to counteract its tendency to reify its object by addressing the imaginative limits of disciplinarity in thinking boredom.

Keywords boredom –​attention –​boredom studies –​psychology –​science studies –​disciplinarity

Ennui … is ecstasy glimpsed from the banks of desire1 roland barthes

∵ 1 “L’Ennui … c’est la jouissance vue de rives du désir” (1973, p. 43). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French and German texts are mine.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_003

24 Goodstein Boredom is (once again) interesting. In the past few years, boredom anthologies have appeared in both German and English, and monographs and essay collections are in print or development in various fields and languages.2 A regular International Interdisciplinary Boredom Conference has been inaugurated in Warsaw, with the aim of “promoting a positive model of non-​boring scientific conference” and thereby “encouraging scientists, especially young ones […] [in] implementing interdisciplinary boredom studies.”3 Nor is it only academics who are paying attention, as the steady stream of how-​to books aimed at avoiding, alleviating, or otherwise eliminating one’s own or one’s children’s boredom attests. 2012 saw the release of what was billed as “the first serious documentary on boredom;” it used boredom to explain everything from riots to the deficits of elementary education and celebrated the latest wave of neuroscientific research as inspiration to turn away from screens, “get outside,” and pay attention to the wonders of real life (Nerenberg, 2012). And in the summer of 2017, the “Books Section” of The New York Times declared that a Boredom Boom had been “quietly asserting itself in books and personal essays since 2015,” seemingly in “reaction to the short attention spans bred by our computers and smartphones” (Alford, 2017). Whether boredom should be understood as the effect, or (as more philosophically inclined interpreters have often argued) as the cause of shortened attention spans, this flowering of interest, scholarly and otherwise, is an index of boredom’s pervasiveness in contemporary life. Not least because boredom feels like it’s been going on forever, we tend to think of it as an eternal feature of the human condition. Like many of today’s other rapidly proliferating forms of subjective malaise, however, boredom needs to be thought in relation to the technologically mediated revolutionary transformations in everyday life in modernity. This essay explores some significant theoretical and practical challenges to establishing a historically informed, culturally reflective, and scientifically adequate account of boredom. 1

Disciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, and the Disciplinary Imaginary We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always nothing but an expression of our

2 See Dalle Pezze and Salzani (2009), and Gardiner and Haladyn (2017). The anthologies edited by McDonough (2017) and Breuninger and Schiemann (2015) are oriented to audiences in the arts and philosophy, respectively. 3 www.boredomconference.com.

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superficiality or inattention [Zerfahrenheit]. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds. Now, it would be important to know: the dialectical antithesis to boredom? walter benjamin (1999 [D2, 7], p. 105, translation modified)

Boredom is by no means a new phenomenon—​according to Walter Benjamin, it was in the 1840s that “ennui began to be felt on an epidemic scale” (1983, vol. 1 [D3, A4], p. 165)—​but it has gained new psychic and social urgency with the computer revolution. Boredom proliferates in a techno-​mediated lived environment, where the commodification of attention (and therewith the insidious dialectic that turns every effort to eliminate boredom into more of the same) has been extended into the most intimate spheres of private life and expanded to even the remotest parts of the globe. One of boredom’s many paradoxes is its intimate connection to both excess and dearth:  it haunts the idle rich, but also the assembly line. Nor, perhaps even more paradoxically, is it necessarily lacking between the extremes of monotony and variety. ‘Boredom’ marks the instability of “just enough;” all too often, it seems to arise out of the very heart of contentment. The troubling of desire it names also lies poised in homeostasis: boredom is the dark twin—​the worldly double—​of equanimity. This paradoxical, seemingly protean indeterminacy is one of the keys to boredom’s deployment in contemporary consumer culture, which has long since transcended the old model of distraction. In today’s attention economy (Davenport and Beck, 2001), the proliferating array of strategies holding out the promise of eluding, evading, and eliminating boredom are intertwined with practices that generate, intensify, and repurpose boredom or the threat of boredom. Indeed, quite often, these poles meet—​consider YouTube, always ready with another slight variant of whatever has drawn one in. The circumstance that boredom can signal either too much or too little—​ lack or surfeit—​presents a significant challenge for theorists. On the one hand, it underlines the irreducibly subjective nature of what I have called an experience without qualities (Goodstein, 2005). Perhaps it is ultimately impossible to give an adequate, generalizable account even of the difference between pleasurable and unpleasurable repetition that marks boredom. However, on the other hand, the protean quality that enables boredom’s apparent ubiquity in contemporary life demands, if not an objective, then at least, a trans-​subjective account of how and—​even more importantly—​why boredom arises, intensifies and proliferates. How is it that the rhythms of life itself become tedious, their repetition a source of pain and even desperation?

26 Goodstein It is by no means clear how best to approach this paradoxically intense experience of emptiness—​this feeling of absence or lack, this seeming encounter with nothingness. Boredom is difficult to delineate, let alone to define, and it appears quite different from different perspectives—​philosophers see problems of meaning, sociologists disturbances in social cohesion, psychologists inappropriate levels of stimulation or difficulties processing sensory input, and so on. Even as boredom has become an object of interest in more disciplines, divergent understandings of the phenomenon itself have thus proliferated. Thanks to the methodological effects of what in French is called déformation professionnelle, the result is a growing expanse of literatures not so much contradictory as non-​congruent, with little evidence of efforts to cross fundamental disciplinary divides. The ascendance of Boredom Studies as a field is thus, at best, an ambiguous development. In the face of a long-​standing, complex, and internally heterogeneous discourse on boredom, such (quasi-​) disciplinary consolidation—​itself a mode of reification—​does not necessarily represent, or even foster, productive engagement across intellectual and institutional boundaries. Boredom remains a different object, as it were, in different disciplinary regions. At the same time, far too many scholarly publications fail to establish a critical perspective on the popular discourse on boredom and thus continue to recycle what had already become very tired clichés even before the turn of the 20th century. In particular, it is frequently taken for granted that boredom is a universal feature of the human condition. While this assumption may appear to be grounded in the experience as such, boredom depends on a specifically modern experience of temporality, and the category itself is a relatively recent entrant into a long and complicated history of cultural, intellectual, theological, and philosophical reflection on subjective malaise. When that longer history is disregarded, and the salience of boredom’s wide-​ranging literary, philosophical, socio-​cultural, and religious genealogy goes unrecognized and unexamined, boredom tends to be conflated with experiences, notably melancholy, that reflect very different ways of thinking about human being and suffering in time. The consequence of this presentism, paradoxically, is an ahistorical mode of universalization that obscures boredom’s modernity and its manifold connections to capitalism and to the industrial-​technological remaking of everyday life in the modern world. Boredom Studies, when genuinely interdisciplinary, can provide invaluable cultural and intellectual perspective on the historic transformations of subjective experience in modernity. Precisely because boredom is a matter of concern well beyond the academy, its study should help foster more nuanced understandings of the vicissitudes of psychic malaise in the contemporary world.

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However, this requires systematic, self-​reflexive consideration of the historical and cultural specificity and contingency of both object and methods of study. Boredom is a philosophical, but also a sociological problem; its pervasiveness is an issue of psychological and cultural as well as medical and economic significance. In principle, today’s broad, cross-​disciplinary interest in boredom could help facilitate confrontation with some very significant methodological and theoretical lacunae in the ways human experience is understood and explored in and beyond the contemporary academy. However, genuinely encompassing interdisciplinary intellectual conversation does not happen on its own. If Boredom Studies is to become more than a symptom of the problem it studies, it is necessary to address the imaginative limits of disciplinarity in thinking boredom and thereby to counteract what seems to be an intrinsic tendency of disciplines to reify their objects of study. As I  demonstrated in Experience without Qualities (2005), since boredom does not fit easily into established analytic categories, doing it justice requires us to question the disciplinary boundaries and assumptions that shape our usual ways of thinking about subjective experience and its representation. But if the difficulties involved in disciplining boredom are acute, they are by no means unique. Before delving further into the discourse on boredom, it will be helpful to reflect on the significance of what I call the disciplinary imaginary in shaping contemporary knowledge practices tout court (see also Goodstein, 2017a). If it is to be adequate to its task, the study of human experience must be oriented to and by the phenomena in their full complexity. This clearly cannot be achieved within the practical and intellectual boundaries of any single discipline, and it is tempting to think about the institutional-​cultural formation of disciplinarity as an adaptive response to that complexity that ‘divides up’ a world of preexisting objects among different disciplines. However, the metaphor is profoundly misleading. There are no objects of knowledge independent of interpretive perspectives, and the multiplicity of competing and coexisting ways human beings understand the world is only partially captured by disciplinary practices that are, by definition, limited in scope and power. Moreover,—​as practitioners of contemporary physics and philosophy, biology and sociology alike would agree—​we cannot understand the whole of reality or experience as singular. The disciplines are more accurately conceived as limited, perspectival approaches, as attempts from different foci and points of departure to come to terms with the irreducible complexity and multiplicity of a world that cannot be assimilated from any particular point of view. Disciplines are ways of seeing and interpreting the world, which also always means: ways of not seeing the world in other ways. Because disciplines render invisible even as they render visible, we

28 Goodstein always need to reflect critically on the strengths and limits of our interpretive perspective(s) and methods of inquiry—​and to do so anew in each particular case. Where disciplinary lenses foreshorten or even occlude real complexity, we must ask whether those simplifications are admissible and desirable. For not only are there significant empirical and practical consequences when models are not sufficiently nuanced or framing assumptions fail to do justice to the phenomena under study. Dominant disciplinary practices and categories—​ and, indeed, the disciplinary division of labor itself—​often cover over thorny theoretical and methodological problems that become evident in more multifaceted encounters with the same phenomena. Simply combining multiple disciplinary perspectives does not in itself adequately address these issues. In many cases, “interdisciplinary” approaches extend rather than interrogate standard disciplinary models of explanation since, in practice, such work does not necessarily involve critical self-​reflection on the limits of interpretive perspectives. Thus, for example, bringing anthropological perspectives into literary study does not necessary lead to the rethinking of assumptions around textuality that a more profound encounter with the other discipline would seem to entail even as, on the other hand, research on narrative in social science often ignores what are, from a literary or rhetorical perspective, essential considerations in exploring texts and language. In such cases, “interdisciplinary” approaches serve to reinforce a disciplinary imaginary whose raison d’être is less intellectual than bureaucratic, deploying strategies that reinscribe disciplinary boundaries and, with them, questionable assumptions about disciplinary knowledge practices and disciplinarity as such into nominally new forms of inquiry. To take another example, the problem-​oriented, “team” approach to interdisciplinary inquiry that is the dominant model in most academic contexts today can be practiced—​and can expand and enrich the so-​called “home disciplines” involved considerably—​without requiring any more in-​depth critical reassessment of the assumptions and methods proper to the particular disciplinary perspectives being combined, let alone raising broader questions about the epistemology or ontology of disciplinarity, or the intellectual division of labor as such. What I call additive interdisciplinarity thereby functions as a sophisticated strategy for innovation within the dominant paradigm, one that maintains the institutional prerogatives and intellectual contours of the disciplines involved rather than calling into question the boundaries it purports to transgress. Interdisciplinary approaches that remain tied to limiting epistemological assumptions not only fail to achieve their promise of innovation—​they effectively serve to extend and restabilize a disciplinary imaginary that fragments inquiry into competing interpretive worlds.

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These days, there is a great deal of excitement about bringing empirical work into interpretive disciplines, and new data-​driven paradigms are making their way into fields such as literary study and philosophy.4 However, genuine interdisciplinary dialogue must proceed in both directions. In studying human experience, social scientists and medical researchers use tools forged in historically particular cultural contexts, languages, and frames of reference to study phenomena that are themselves shaped by culture, language, and history—​and do so from perspectives and in ways whose cultural, historical, linguistic, and empirical limitations are by no means always transparent to them. In this register, what used to be called the human sciences have a great deal to teach the contemporary social and natural sciences. This circumstance is nowhere more evident than in contemporary empirical studies of boredom. However, before turning to boredom, it will be helpful to briefly to consider contemporary scientific work on a related and sometimes ­conflated topic. 2

Attending to Attention Moreover, we are always in a certain state of distraction, since the attention, in concentrating the mind on a small number of objects, diverts it from a greater number of others; for all distraction has the effect of keeping out of consciousness psychic states which, since they are active, do not cease to be real émile durkheim (1898, p. 291)

The notion that attention is a power of the human mind is nothing new, but the practice of treating it as quantifiable is a relatively recent development. In the second half of the 19th century, reconceptualizing attention and making it measurable helped establish the foundations of modern psychology—​and played a significant role in the evolution of capitalism.5

4 For a nuanced discussion of some of the problematics involved in using large data sets to generate insights into historical and cultural changes in representational practices, see Mangrum (2018). 5 The earliest attestation of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary is to Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy (ii, i, p. 29). For a historical perspective on the constitution of the modern scientific discourse on attention, see Rabinbach (1992) as well as Crary (1999). As Durkheim’s just-​cited essay underlines, awareness of what might be called the perceptual unconscious helped shape sociology and anthropology as well as psychology.

30 Goodstein Today, of course, psychology, anthropology, and the history and philosophy of science have become independent fields, and most empirical research on attention severs the phenomenon from its philosophical background and disregards the broader historical and cultural context entirely. The ironic consequence is that even researchers who advocate bringing the study of attention into “the real world” follow in a largely uncritical way in the steps of the predecessors who laid the foundation of modern time management and advertising science.6 Within this field, what appear from a historical and cultural perspective to be crucial theoretical and methodological issues, including the way attention was constituted as an object of scientific study in the first place tend to be ignored entirely—​to be treated, as it were, as unworthy of attention. As in other forms of systematic exclusion, the resulting silence on matters of concern to outsiders is by no means evident to participants in the dominant discourse. This lack of attention to the history of attention as an object of study is not random or accidental, nor, as anchored in research practices that help constitute intellectual community in psychology, is it easily overcome. In contemporary scientific work on attention, disciplinary expectations regarding consideration of predecessors (and thus conventions regarding citations of relevant scholarly literature) are narrowly defined in relation to the particular subset of psychological inquiry relevant to the experiments and theories being reported upon. This fact is not a problem in itself—​or, to be more precise, does not appear so within these particular disciplinary-​ discursive boundaries. Such highly circumscribed citational practices (which are, of course, by no means limited to psychology) perfectly illustrate the operations of what Thomas Kuhn (1962) dubbed normal science, which proceeds by reflecting and reinforcing rather than challenging the (currently) dominant scientific consensus. In this case, there is plenty of relevant research outside that narrowly defined. If we take a broader perspective on the phenomenon of attention—​as we must in order to understand the significance, history, and implications of attention and attention-​disturbances in the contemporary world—​such a highly circumscribed definition and narrow discipline-​specific approach are clearly inadequate. As Kuhn would have predicted, when such broader empirical and methodological issues do rear their heads in the literature on attention, their importance is minimized or reframed to reinforce the dominant disciplinary paradigm. Of particular interest is the way such moments reveal contemporary 6 See The Handbook of Attention, edited by Fawcett, Risko, and Kingstone (2015). For a recent popular take on these matters that provides a useful critical overview of the links between psychological research and contemporary capitalist practices, see Wu (2016).

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psychology’s strategies for disregarding and obscuring the historical and cultural embeddedness of scientific inquiry itself.7 Consider, for example, how the editors of the 2014 Oxford Handbook on Attention address the issue of a lack of precise terminology in the sub-​discipline and the resulting haziness in taxonomy (Nobre et al., 2014, p. 1206): Several authors in the Handbook lament the state of our current nomenclature and urge for more care. Developing precise terminology and working towards an accepted taxonomy are important aims for the field at this stage. Clearly stated definitions and concepts would help kick-​start the essential iterative process between theory and experimentation—​ guiding future experimentation and discussion, which in turn leads to refinement of definitions and concepts, which in turn guide experimentation and discussion … [ellipsis in original] Having said this, it is also remarkable how much progress the field has achieved with its flexible and somewhat erratic terminology.8 If what is at stake in determining the meaning of attention is nothing more than nomenclature, and psychological science can, in any case, advance without definitional clarity, it seems that historical and cultural horizons and contexts can safely be ignored. The methodological consequence is a sort of intradisciplinary solipsism. As the editors of the Oxford Handbook on Attention put it, “if one were to distil a core definition of attention out of the contemporary literature, it would be something like: the prioritization of processing information that is relevant to current task goals” (Nobre et al., 2014, p. 1204). This sort of definition cannot provide much traction for boundary-​crossing critical studies of the ongoing transformation of work and attention in today’s technologically saturated environment. Nor can it help parents struggling with one key result of research 7 What is at stake concerns not just “context” but evidentiary foundations. Thus, the unquestioned premise that we can study the phenomena of consciousness in exclusively quantitative ways helps render uncontroversial the rather astonishing fact that the subject populations of so many psychological studies consist entirely of undergraduates. 8 It is worth noting that, according to the editors of the Oxford Handbook, attention psychology’s locus classicus remains William James’s tendentious claim that there is universal consensus on the meaning of their core concept: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others” (1890, p. 404).

32 Goodstein done within the confines of this psychological paradigm: whether they should consent to psychopharmacological behavioral modification for a child diagnosed with “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” (Racine, Bar-​Ilan, and Illes, 2005, p. 161).9 In the case of boredom, matters are even more complicated. As I demonstrated in Experience without Qualities (2005), defining boredom is no simple matter. In contrast to ‘attention,’ which appears, at least, to have a more straightforward empirical referent in the structure of human consciousness as such, ‘boredom’ is irreducibly ambiguous, fraught with figurative meanings and associations. There is significant historical and cultural variability and internal complexity within the phenomenon itself, and the same multiplicity is evident in the historically evolving and culturally variable discourse on boredom. The many non-​congruent and even contradictory meanings invoked with or attributed to the experience are mirrored and elaborated in an array of competing disciplinary approaches and models of reflection on boredom. The methodological challenges involved in studying a phenomenon so profoundly inflected by history, culture, and language are thus even more significant than in the case of attention. Nonetheless, contemporary empirical psychologists generally approach boredom in an ahistorical fashion and leave scholarship from other fields out of account entirely both in framing their experiments and in presenting their findings. Such systematic neglect must be interrogated, for disciplinary blinders shield the dominant disciplinary paradigm from essential critiques. The project of reflection on consciousness is itself embedded in history and culture, and theories and methods that take that embeddedness to heart implicitly challenge the constitutive assumption that science can advance by disregarding such “context.” As we shall see, within contemporary psychology, occluding the cultural/​ historical situatedness of research into human experience helps experimentalists maintain (at least, in practice, if not always in theory) a long-​outdated, scientistic self-​understanding. As this subfield of psychological inquiry expands, experiments governed by highly questionable assumptions about boredom in particular and human experience in general generate results that, in turn, become part of self-​reinforcing feedback loops that further strengthen the institutional power of an intellectually flawed paradigm in scientific psychology. 9 In describing the broader problem of “leaps of faith” and “neurofallacies” put forward in press coverage and marketing of developments in neuroscience, Racine et  al. note the possible role of media in “the medicalization of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” since press coverage of imaging study results tends to downplay “environmental and cultural causes” in favor of “biological and genetic” factors (2005, pp. 160–​161).

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It might be objected that these are working assumptions and tentative hypotheses—​that for science to advance via empirical work, simplifications are inevitable, and (good) scientists have a more sophisticated understanding of human experience than can (presently) be reflected experimentally. These points may be readily conceded; it is clear (many of) those involved in experimental studies of boredom and attention do recognize the limitations of their working assumptions and empirical methods. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that this recognition has a minimal impact on mainstream scientific practice. As the methodological reflections just cited illustrate, highly schematic ideas and methods are continually being mobilized to reinforce the cultural and social force of a long-​since discredited understanding of scientific inquiry in which operationalization displaces methodological reflection. Within this framework, the question of the significance—​as opposed to the effects—​of boredom cannot be properly posed. Elsewhere, I have examined the problems that have beset attempts to establish empirically valid means of measuring boredom and ‘boredom proneness’ (2017b). Here, I shall explore a different approach to studying boredom in a newer sub-​discipline of experimental psychology. As we shall see, experiments using fMRI brain imagining underline the methodological significance of the case of boredom for the contemporary disciplinary formation of psychology. However, this work also foregrounds some significant theoretical and practical challenges involved in representing and investigating subjective experience as such—​and thereby reveals some of the theoretical and methodological limits to work within the paradigm of psychology as an experimental science. Recent work in neuropsychology illustrates that the challenges of inquiry into boredom can be simplified considerably by taking ahistorical definitions rather than the tangled ambiguities of lived experience as a starting point. However, the resulting advantages come at the cost of redefining the experience itself to the point that this work arguably loses touch with what, from a cultural and historical perspective, is actually at stake in boredom. This example will thus return us to the broader theoretical and methodological questions about the limitations of scientific models and the adequacy of the framing assumptions that animate what goes by the name of empirical research in a technologically mediated age. As I have already indicated, because boredom is a historically highly specific experience that masquerades as a universal feature of the human condition, these conceptual-​practical challenges are particularly acute in investigating and theorizing about it. Studies of boredom thus reveal the importance of methodological self-​reflection within disciplinary paradigms—​including consideration of the limits of the paradigms ­themselves.

34 Goodstein 3

Representing Boredom In general, and in all ways, it is one of the hardest of things to gain any conviction about the soul [psyche] aristotle (1986, i, 402a, pp. 10–​11)

In academia, as in the broader public sphere today, there is a troubling tendency to communicate only with those with whom one agrees on all the fundamentals. This is terrible for democracy, but it’s even worse for the scholarship. As in politics, the most popular and privileged voices can get away with shutting dissenting voices, in this case other scholarly communities, out of the conversation, and power, rather than truth, becomes decisive. This silencing occurs both within and among disciplines, and the consequence can be systematic distortion of our modes of understanding.10 In this connection, it is troubling—​and should be so not only for those of us working on the humanistic side of the campus divide in intellectual cultures—​ that in 2018, a peer-​reviewed article could open with the assertion that “Boredom is a common human experience that until fairly recently had not garnered much research attention” (Danckert and Merrifield, 2018, p. 2507). Unsurprisingly, this self-​confident expression of ignorance or willful neglect of what are, quite literally, centuries of research attention, comes from the popular darling of today’s natural sciences: imaging-​driven brain research. For those who are aware of the venerable and multifaceted body of inquiry and reflection on boredom, a great deal is missing or wrong in the enframing of this “new” field, which appeared in a special issue of Experimental Brain Research, edited by James Danckert (also the lead author of the article just cited).11 Yet in an issue that includes several other contributions on boredom, the extensive historical, philosophical, literary, and, for that matter, social scientific bodies of research on boredom and related phenomena are simply not taken into consideration. For anyone with a richer sense of the alternative

10

11

I use this term in a sense developed by Jürgen Habermas, whose account of the systematische Verzerrung of communication in capitalist modernity may be found in his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns [Theory of Communicative Action] (1981). Habermas’s conception is not to be confused with uses of the English systematic distortion to refer to statistically significant issues with experimental results in various psychological contexts. See, for example, Shweder and D’Andrade’s defense of their eponymous hypothesis about the power of cognitive models vis à vis memory in personality typing (1979). The issue’s special topic was “Mind-​wandering, Boredom, and Attention.” All of the articles included were originally published online in 2016 and 2017.

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perspectives and knowledges in those traditions, the growing sub-​discipline can only appear impoverished. Danckert’s introduction makes no reference to any works published before 2001, and neither that article nor the literature review included in the same issue discusses any perspectives from outside of the modern discipline of psychology.12 Instead, as is unfortunately typical of many contemporary disciplines where practitioners have little knowledge of their intellectual histories and cultural evolution, in keeping with whiggish convictions about scientific progress, a few significant predecessors are accorded supporting roles in a potted prehistory of current views. Thus, Danckert opens his introductory essay with the highly questionable assertion that “psychology, as a subject for scientific inquiry, began with introspection—​interrogating the contents of one’s mental life” (2018, p. 2447) and goes on to situate his own work in a tradition of dissent from the behaviorist paradigm James Watson pioneered. Gesturing to the longer intellectual and cultural history out of which his own field of psychology emerged with a cavalier “[p]‌hilosophers from Hume to Kant have urged caution when relying on introspection, highlighting that interrogating a thought necessarily changes the content of the thought itself” (2018, p. 2447), he claims that introspection has taken cover in the discipline both terminologically and procedurally, as in experimental “neurowash[ing]” of interest in “thought processes,” but has “refused to die as an important tool to understand the mind” (2018, p. 2447).13

12

13

Raffaelli, Mills, and Christoff’s literature review is oriented by what they call “the most commonly employed definition of boredom at this point”: Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske, and Smilek’s description of boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, [sic] to engage in satisfying activity” (2012, p.  482, quoted in 2018, p.  2452). Raffaelli et  al. also advance a highly ahistorical understanding of psychology itself. To take just one example, perspectives from psychoanalysis, which played an important role in the discipline until well into the 20th century, are quickly dispensed with in the body of the text and are almost absent from the bibliography. The only exceptions are brief references to Viktor Frankl’s best-​selling Man’s Search for Meaning and to papers by Otto Fenichel and Hanna Fenichel, neither of which is correctly cited. (The reference to O. Fenichel’s classic paper “On the Psychology of Boredom” fails to note that its original publication (in German) was in 1934 (not 1953; he died in 1946), and the entry for H. Fenichel’s “Review of the Literature on Boredom” is misleading: the citation actually refers to a report on proceedings from the meetings of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Psychoanalytic Societies in October 1950, where other papers on boredom, to which no reference is made, were also presented). Pretty much everything in this sentence is questionable, up to and including the troublingly naïve epistemology that severs thought from its content. Similar considerations apply to the remarks that follow, likewise from p. 2447, regarding introspection as a tool.

36 Goodstein Both formally and substantively, this sort of thing is rather far from being a testament to scientific progress in psychology. On the contrary, in the broader context of systematic reflection on human experience, the limitations of the methodological framework and ontological assumptions in play are all too evident. In framing brain imaging studies as a strategy for reintroducing “properly handled” introspection into scientific psychology, Danckert reveals how much the work in question is orientated by a need to innovate within the fundamentally reductive scientistic paradigm that dominates the contemporary discipline. Thus, it is that the first desideratum, “a concrete definition of terms,” is supposed to “evolve alongside experimental work” that investigates the sorts of “circumstances that give rise to” boredom and associated phenomena “as well as the associated neural and behavioral consequences of those phenomena” (2018, p. 2447). Many non-​psychologists will have a hard time accepting this strategy for arriving at a definition of boredom, which presumes that only what can be measured and experimentally verified needs to be taken into account. However, like the historiographical and methodological critiques already alluded to, such objections will probably not get a hearing. From the other disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, it is tempting to respond by trying to make those critiques more powerful, more sophisticated, more compelling. However, it is quite doubtful that this would make a difference for those working within this paradigm, albeit for reasons that have, at best, very little to do with the value of those other analytic perspectives or ways of understanding the problem of definition. At this point, there is a considerable literature on boredom in the sub-​ discipline of experimental psychology—​that is to say, there is a community with shared interests (intellectual but also material, since brain research is expensive) and a broad foundation of shared convictions concerning language, causation, science, experimental methods, and so on. The fact that this community sanctions scholarship in which a wide range of alternative understandings and approaches are not mentioned, let alone engaged with critically, is an index not just of the intellectual strength but also of the institutional power of the neuroscientific imaging-​mediated paradigm in the contemporary world.14 Thanks to their privilege within that larger cultural, intellectual, and 14

The (ideological as well as financial) power of technoscience tout court here comes to the service of a field whose grounding in quantitative methodology is far shakier than even other social sciences. Many thanks to Dylan Schellenberg for research assistance with the scientific literature—​and the great conversations concerning the issues with fMRI studies and contemporary neuroscience more generally.

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socio-​economic environment, scientists can get away with silencing opposition by writing research that challenges their own out of existence entirely. What is at issue is not merely a failure to address the critiques of the underlying assumptions that underpin this way of representing boredom in particular. Willful ignorance regarding alternative perspectives on introspection, on emotions, on the mind, enables psychologists to make arguments based on statistically generated “images of boredom” without having to engage with a wide range of fundamental philosophical issues concerning the representation of subjective experience in their field in general.15 The following image detail (Figure 1.1) from Danckert and Merrifield’s already cited article (2018) ­illustrates how very literally these issues arise in the ways subjective experience is being represented and interpreted in this burgeoning sub-​discipline. Even setting aside the questions concerning the image itself, the assertion that boredom has been localized in a particular brain region is highly problematic from several perspectives. This kind of imaging study is regarded with skepticism by many scientists in and outside the field of psychology.16 Fundamental methodological issues have been raised regarding the use of fMRI brain imaging in the study of behavior and emotion in general, as well as concerning the validity of claims being advanced on the basis of questionable statistical practices in similar studies.17 15

16

17

These concerns are, to be sure, taken up elsewhere. To name just a few major sources, see Cartwright (1995) and the essays collected in Carusi et al. (2015) regarding imaging technologies; with respect to the wider cultural-​historical and theoretical background, Martin Jay (1993) and Dalia Judovitz’s (2001) works offer a range of critical resources and engagements with discussions in other fields. Nikos K. Logothetis provides a helpful overview of methodological concerns about neuroimaging and the resulting constraints on interpretation, concluding that “[t]‌he limitations of fMRI are not related to physics or poor engineering, and are unlikely to be resolved by increasing the sophistication and power of the scanners; they are instead due to the circuitry and functional organization of the brain, as well as to inappropriate experimental protocols that ignore this organization” (2008, pp. 876–​877). See also the 2012 editorial in Nature Methods, which remarks that, despite burgeoning interest and investments in fMRI technology, “it’s striking how little we know about the fMRI signal itself [that is, about what the blood oxygen level-​dependent [bold] contrast data refer to] and in particular about how to interpret it in terms of brain activation. The incomplete understanding of this signal limits the inferences that can be made from fMRI data and thus their usefulness for understanding how our brains work” (2008, p. 517). Vul et  al. focus on the problematic uses of statistics in fMRI work. Questioning the plausibility of the “extremely high (e.g. >8) correlations between brain activations and personality measures” (2009, p. 274) in many “high profile” psychological studies, they conducted a meta-​analysis that enabled them to demonstrate that the vast majority of “improbably high correlations” in the studies they surveyed could be attributed to

38 Goodstein

Figure 1.1  Detail from Danckert and Merrifield (2018, Fig. 3, partial, courtesy of James Danckert).

However, the popularity of fMRI work and the vogue for extending these technological-​statistical strategies into ever new areas has hardly been impacted by these critiques. A study published in the Proceedings of the National fundamentally flawed statistical analyses (with “over half of the investigators […] us[ing] methods that are guaranteed to offer greatly inflated estimates of correlations” (2009, p. 285)—​to wit, deploying nonindependent variables!). Vul et al. “conclude that a disturbingly large, and quite prominent, segment of fMRI research on emotion, personality, and social cognition is using seriously defective research methods and producing a profusion of numbers that should not be believed” (2009, p. 285). The authors warned that “the underlying problems” (2009, p. 274) were probably not limited to psychology due to the likelihood that the same “questionable analysis methods discussed here are also widespread in other fields that use fMRI to study individual differences, such as cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuroscience, and neurogenetics” (2009, p. 285). The provocative “dead salmon study” by Bennett et al. (originally presented as a poster session at the 2009 Human Brain Mapping conference in San Francisco) corroborated this suggestion, also vividly calling attention to problematic statistical practices and calling for better analytic controls (2010; see also Gewin, 2012). These issues have by no means been resolved in the intervening years, and multiple studies continue to identify statistical issues and to underline the significance of problems of individual differences (of multiple sorts: on the vascular level, in neural processing, etc.).

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Academy of Sciences in 2016 concluded that “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis […] can result in false-​positive rates of up to 70%” (Eklund, Nichols, and Knutsson, 2016, p. 33).18 I am not in a position to judge whether and to what extent the methodological criticisms raised against this sort of extrapolation in other fMRI studies apply in the case of the work on boredom and attention under discussion here.19 However, it is not necessary to trace the ins and outs of the analysis of voxels and non-​independent variables in the statistical work on which these “images” depend to question the claims embedded in Danckert and Merrifield’s arrow. The proposition that ‘boredom’ can be understood as situated in a specific area of the brain is fundamentally problematic for all sorts of reasons. The popularity of fMRI studies and the apparent plausibility of such highly marketable seemingly transparent “images” purporting to be empirical representations of mental life is a function of a wide range of factors that call for historical, cultural, and critical analysis. It is here that cross-​disciplinary engagement would be essential to establishing the actual import of studies of boredom along these lines. I must underline that my point in raising these issues is not that psychology is unique among the disciplines in its lack of openness to alternative perspectives hailing from other scholarly traditions. Every discourse community tends to close upon itself, and, in our highly differentiated and specialized intellectual world, scholarly innovation takes place mostly within the boundaries of relatively small groups with fairly extensive bodies of shared common assumptions and practices. Thanks to larger institutional and social structures that assure practitioners from disparate, especially distant fields need not come into a conversation about the things that define their distinct specializations, disciplines and their distinct intellectual cultures evolve in relative independence 18

19

Eklund et  al. (2016) advance a devastating critique of scientific practices in the field, including “lamentable archiving and data-​sharing practices,” questionable statistical work, and lack of validated methods. Crucially, after a quarter-​century of fMRI imaging, they write, “its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data” (p. 7904). It was their effort to do so that led them to the appalling estimate regarding false positives cited above. These are by no means the only methodological issues with this research. In addition to these statistical issues, very fundamental questions about quantification, representation, and definition also need to be addressed. A fuller discussion would also need to engage with the problem of generating boredom in the lab. Danckert and Merrifield include a still from the film they use, which shows two men folding laundry. The video itself may be viewed at YouTube “The Most Boring Video Ever” (2016), where user comments underline that the viewer response is by no means uniformly one of boredom (https://​www. youtube.com/​watch?v=s34zGmq3rXQ).

40 Goodstein even when, from a broader perspective, their objects and concerns seem to overlap. Thus, what is known from within the broader framework of inquiry into subjective experience through technologically mediated representations of the intricacies of neural processing is continuously expanding—​even as, across the quads, ever more sophisticated critiques of the neuroscience paradigm are being elaborated: objections to its fundamental reductiveness, its residual Cartesianism, implausible assumptions about images, unsubtle conception of affect, and so on. Of course these knowledge practices have very different audiences. For all sorts of reasons, sophisticated critiques of contemporary technoscience find few readers among practitioners. From within the framework of today’s prosthetically enhanced empiricism, the mediating and distorting effects of imaging technologies in scientific knowledge production pose practical rather than theoretical challenges.20 Still, history teaches us that scientists need to think seriously about the cultural and political as well as ethical and philosophical implications of the ways they frame their work. In my view, it should be more actively troubling to this generation of scientists that representations of statistically massaged amalgamations of fMRI test results are so readily consumed by the public as images of human mental and emotional life as such—​and that these are being marketed as the products of a new technological capacity to “look inside the living brain.”21 However, it appears that, from the perspective of practitioners of what my colleague Sander Gilman calls ‘the new phrenology,’ these are not issues for psychology as such. Exaggerations and misleading uses of images in the public sphere are all too readily blamed on the press, and everyone concedes that simplifications are unavoidable in that essential form of interdisciplinary communication, the grant application. While a complex set of practices and procedures have been elaborated to ensure that research on human subjects is conducted in an ethical fashion, these images and their uses raise different sorts of philosophical and theoretical issues. And unfortunately both for science and for public discourse, ethical and epistemological concerns and methodological objections rooted in a deeper awareness of the history of thought quite literally belong, along with the colleagues who raise them, to other departments.22 20

21 22

Thus, the scientists who did the meta-​analyses that issued in the methodological and statistical critiques noted above understood themselves to be engaged in a constructive process of peer review to assure the highest scientific standards in imaging work; they do not raise issues related to the representations in other senses, but see Racine et al. (2005). This phrase hails from Nerenberg’s documentary on boredom (2012). This is also true of bioethicists, who have drawn attention to challenges in representing and communicating the meaning of fMRI studies responsibly from yet another direction. See

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The study of boredom can and should provide a chance to do things differently. Reading this particular literature on boredom and attention, one frequently comes across indications that contemporary psychologists are chafing at the methodological as well as conceptual constraints imposed by the need to operate (and help their students operate) effectively within the terms of an intellectual world that appears to have vastly narrowed in recent decades. As things stand, too much of human experience is currently written out of an increasingly stratified and fragmented discipline, in and for which an aspiration to understand human psychology in a comprehensive fashion appears hopelessly outdated. Thus, there are very compelling substantive reasons for psychologists to take another look at the longer traditions of reflection on boredom and related phenomena and to try to reconnect contemporary work with the broader concerns that shaped the scientific discipline of psychology in the first place. There are also significant extra-​disciplinary reasons for pursuing such an expanded vision of what is at stake in this sort of work. Thanks in no small part to the cultural prestige of science, the limitations of the psychological disciplinary imaginary have significant socio-​cultural as well as transdisciplinary effects. Brain imaging methodology performatively reinscribes the mechanistic, ahistorical vision of the human inherited from behaviorist psychology in a new technological and representational regime that is impacting human self-​ understanding well beyond psychology. In the social sciences more widely—​ but also in the media and popular culture—​the unquestioning and uncontextualized deployment of fMRI “images” is reinforcing the exclusion of the critical reflection on history and culture, language and identity that is both theoretically and practically necessary for understanding subjective experience. Deeper considerations of the value and significance of historical and critical perspectives on boredom and attention could help foster the interrogation of questionable baseline assumptions about science and the impoverished conception of research that lead those working within the neuroscientific paradigm to leave other interpretive perspectives out of consideration altogether. Academic life is deeply siloed. In many areas—​publishing, peer-​review, teaching—​people are isolated among others who share their specialized intellectual culture and disciplinary worldview. Where this is not the case, as the armed truces of major funding agencies or university tenure and promotion committees attest, coexistence and mutual consideration do not guarantee Racine et al. (2005), which helpfully distinguishes the problem of “neuro-​realism” (abstracting away “the enormous complexities of data acquisition and image processing” to construe an fMRI image “as a ‘visual proof’ of brain activity”) from the “neuro-​essentialism” that depicts fMRI research “as equating subjectivity and personal identity to the brain” (p. 160).

42 Goodstein successful communication. If we are to overcome the limitations of the contemporary disciplinary imaginary, everyone needs to be open to difficult conversations. In this case, some very fundamental rethinking is called for, by no means only on the part of these scientists, if we are to get beyond what I have long argued are symptomatic difficulties we encounter in theorizing boredom. This essay was written with the understanding that the present volume would include contributions by empirical psychologists. While this has not turned out to be the case, I continue to hope that it may help bring about a more in-​depth dialogue on the problem of boredom among those working in different methodological frameworks. As in the political sphere, real dialogue cannot take place without a critical examination of assumptions, including methodological assumptions about basic issues such as what counts as definition. Reflecting on such matters can help us cultivate awareness of the ways that the contemporary disciplinary organization of intellectual culture supports and propagates habits of self-​understanding that too often prevent, rather than foster, critical reflection on our knowledge and knowledge practices as well as on the direction of our collective existence. If we are to overcome the imaginative limits inscribed in the contemporary disciplinary order, we will need dialogue about the representational regime that enframes our thinking about subjective experience tout court in an era of globalized techno-​science. It is crucial to situate what image-​driven brain research is disclosing about our mind-​bodies in relation to the longer western traditions of inquiry into the human experience (including the prehistory of those scientific methods themselves), as well as to reflect on how these and other quantitatively mediated techniques of knowing are impacting human modes of self-​understanding. To get at these larger issues, it will be necessary to call into question some conveniently unexamined thinking about language, temporality, and history that are operative in other very different disciplinary contexts, as well. 4

Defining Boredom All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically consolidated escape definition; only that which has no history is definable nietzsche23

23

„Alle Begriffe, in denen sich ein ganzer Prozess semiotisch zusammenfasst, entziehen sich der Definition; definierbar ist nur Das, was keine Geschichte hat“ (1980, p. 317).

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As the case of boredom makes particularly clear, we need to work quite hard to think about the subjective experience in ways that are sufficiently complex both historically and philosophically. From the beginnings of the discourse on boredom, the experiential dynamic by which each moment takes on eternity has seduced sufferers into regarding it as a universal feature of the human condition. Attempts to fit boredom into the ahistorical framework of empirical scientific inquiry bracket the grounds for skepticism about that universality entirely—​in ways that further reinforce contemporary psychology’s disciplinary and historical blinders. Despite its grand title—​“The Knowns and Unknowns of Boredom:  A Review of the Literature”—​the review article that appears in the September 2018 special issue of Experimental Brain Science does not include even a single philosophical source; its authors use the term ‘literature’ to refer exclusively to academic work in the discipline of psychology. This narrow view is troubling precisely in its conformity to standard disciplinary practice. The issue is not merely that Raffaelli et  al. thereby pass over vast bodies of reflection on boredom—​in the arts and literature, in cultural and literary criticism and theory, in sociology and anthropology—​in apparent ignorance. Because the phenomenon of boredom has deep cultural roots, its history of representation in literature and philosophy continues to shape the language with which we represent the experience and thus boredom itself. In proceeding as though ‘boredom’ could, in principle, be defined without reference to anything outside their sub-​field of psychology, the authors obscure the very experience they set out to study. Unintended howlers like “[p]‌reliminary evidence suggests the existence of distinct types of boredom” (Raffaelli et al., 2018, p. 2451) illustrates one of the greatest perils of disciplinarity: a methodological solipsism inimical to the intellectual ambitions of science. Within this branch of psychology, however, the assumption that boredom can be defined in such a way that it can become the object of verifiable empirical investigation is fundamentally uncontroversial. From this perspective, the challenge, as Raffaelli et al. put it, is that “[d]‌espite the ubiquitous nature of boredom, the definition, function, and correlates of boredom are still poorly understood” (2018, p. 2451). The rhetoric of operationalization clouds, though it does not entirely hide, the fact that untenable assumptions are in play—​first and foremost, the axiom that boredom has a “ubiquitous nature,” that is to say, is a timeless universal feature of the human condition as such, albeit “one known by many names” (2018, p. 2451). Tellingly, the evidence Raffaelli et al. offer for this historically inaccurate and psychologically rather tendentious, at best unprovable, working assumption is “literary”—​a catalog of names from a commencement address:  “anguish,

44 Goodstein ennui, tedium, the doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, [and] languor” (2018, p. 2451). It hardly seems the most reliable source, even if the speaker is Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Moreover, from a perspective grounded in the broader literature on boredom, this collection of names for boredom simply does not cut it. What, for example, of melancholy and acedia, widely recognized as two of the most significant, if not the most significant, older experiences often identified with boredom? On the other hand, Brodsky’s catalog casts too wide a net: anguish or lethargy may be associated with boredom, but surely it confuses matters to identify all three. To be sure, Raffaelli et al. are not offering up carefully considered literary evidence; the quotation is not analyzed at all. The invocation of Brodsky serves, instead, as a symbolic gesture; it is meant to motivate the reader to accept the authors’ unquestioned premise that boredom is a ubiquitous feature of the human condition—​and thus that the term ‘boredom’ refers to a single experience that goes by other names in different contexts. That view is widespread both in and beyond the academy, and a philosophical case can be made for it, albeit an ontologically as well as historically shaky one. Nevertheless, the strategy of listing various “names” for boredom (often, as here, by invoking a literary authority) is a rhetorical sleight of hand that posits the universality it purports to show. Having probed the philosophical and analytic difficulties entailed by such a hypostatization of boredom into an ahistorical feature of the human condition at length elsewhere, I shall restate my conclusions here. The view that boredom is a universal experience or emotion is ultimately idealist. The term itself is first attested in the mid-​19th century. Abstracting boredom from its lived context and conflating it with categories with very different qualities, valences, histories, and contexts obscures the significance of those differences, making it impossible to recognize what is distinctively modern in the discourse on boredom that took shape in the period.24 Boredom has complex genealogical relations with much older vocabularies of reflection on subjective malaise—​with idioms that have very different valences and resonances. To universalize this historically and culturally specific language of reflection on subjective experience is to avoid crucial questions about the way 24 The Oxford English Dictionary credits Dickens and Eliot. I  discuss the etymological evidence for the emergence of a distinctive European discourse on boredom that also encompasses the term’s correlates in other European languages in Chapter 3 of Experience without Qualities (2005). As I show, even as ‘boredom’ appears and quickly disseminates in English, the meanings of the much older principal cognate terms, the French ennui, and the German Langeweile, tend to converge; because the English word synthesizes the more existentially oriented French conception with the explicit temporality of the German, I use the English term to refer to this Europe-​wide discourse on boredom.

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human experience has changed over time, in particular as a consequence of the industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization of everyday life that accompanied the rise of capitalism. Precisely because boredom, thanks to its internal dynamics, tends to be experienced as a universal feature of the human condition, attending to its historical and cultural specificity is essential. If we are to gain sufficient analytic traction, this subjective feeling of universality cannot be taken at face value; like the negative eternity that appears to the bored subject, this illusion of ubiquity must be explained in terms of the dynamics of (historically, culturally, linguistically varying) subjective experience. Crucially, the contemporary discourse on boredom depends on and reflects a specifically modern experience of temporality: a secularized experience of meaningless empty time linked to what Wolfgang Schivelbusch called “the industrialization of space and time in the nineteenth century” (1986, title). This mode of temporality is tied, in manifold ways, to the material and immaterial transformations of human existence that accompanied urbanization. As Georg Simmel pointed out at the dawn of the 20th century, “the technology of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and super-​subjective temporal schema” (1903, pp. 119–​120). The internal connection between boredom and the increasing domination of the rhythms of everyday life by clock-​time helps account for both the perceived significance of boredom as lived experience and for the proliferation of the phenomenon in the contemporary world.25 Placing the discourse on boredom in historical and socio-​cultural context can thus help clarify the significance of the historic transformations of subjective experience in modernity, not least by making visible the difference between boredom and antecedent older experiences of subjective malaise that are shaped by very different experiences and understandings of human ­temporality.26 Viewed in this longer horizon, Brodsky’s catalog illustrates a highly significant change in the rhetoric of reflection on subjective experience during the modern period:  what I  call the medicalization of malaise. Historically, the metaphorics of boredom emerged and took root in the context of a broader discursive shift that gave rise to a new, disenchanted language of reflection on 25

26

There is a vast literature on time and temporality. Regarding the significance of the standardization of time for modern economies, see, representatively, Thompson’s classic essay, “Time, Work-​discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), and Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993). For an erudite approach to the history of boredom from a universalizing idealist perspective, see Reinhard Kuhn’s The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (1976).

46 Goodstein subjective experience in post-​Enlightenment European culture. What was frequently identified as an “epidemic” of boredom was both index and symptom of the consolidation of a new, skeptical, scientific idiom that was reshaping understandings of both self and world in a materialist key. Premodern antecedents such as acedia, melancholy, or taedium vitae implicitly or explicitly framed subjective disaffection in relation to theological and metaphysical concerns. In the course of the 19th century, as the experience and explanation of subjective malaise became increasingly centered on the body as such, these older categories were partially absorbed into the new disenchanted language that was displacing them. As the experiential reflection of a new secularized temporality, boredom’s abstract emptiness resonated with older, more idealist ways of enframing psychic suffering yet paved the way for the reductive medicalized conception of malaise that was emerging—​for the model, so dominant today, that explains even the gravest dislocations of meaning and identity as functions of chemical imbalance. It is, then, no accident that Brodsky’s list—​“anguish, ennui, tedium, the doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor”—​ reads like a series of symptoms of depression. In invoking it, Raffaelli et al. not only frame boredom in physiological terms that abstract reflection on boredom from its (material and socio-​economic) conditions of emergence. They also activate the discursive force of the medicalization of malaise, which (still, as historically) functions to foreclose the broader theological and philosophical horizon implied by metaphysically and theoretically resonant categories such as melancholy, acedia, and taedium vitae. Boredom should not be conflated with these antecedents, yet as an experience of temporality that took shape in relation to and thus inherited some of the metaphysical and theological legacy of older encounters with empty, apparently meaningless time, it cannot entirely be reduced to a medicalized symptom, either. The language of boredom retains a metaphorical dimension—​and the subject who asserts his or her boredom, a degree of spiritual freedom—​that resists assimilation to clock time and to the reductive, institutionalized management of subjective malaise that is dominant in contemporary consumer society. As our discussion of the problem of attention also underlined, historical reflection has methodological implications for empirical research. It is no simple matter to study boredom, and those attempting to define (and sometimes produce) it for such purposes encounter very fundamental problems. In their literature review, Raffaelli et  al. document a wide array of “inconsistencies” (2018, p.  2541) in previous (psychological) studies of boredom. They suggest these could be redressed by “adopting a more precise and consistent way of operationalizing boredom, and arriving at an empirically validated taxonomy

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of different types of boredom” (2018, p. 2541). If such measures can be realized, they will doubtless lead to more consistent results. However, not only does such an approach elude critical questions about the historical, cultural, and socio-​economic environment that fosters boredom. What these scientists discovered in the course of their search for empirically verified correlates suggests that such definitional and procedural strategies can work only at the cost of simplifying away much of what is most interesting about boredom in the first place. As Raffaelli et al.’s review of the “knowns and unknowns of boredom” (2018, p. 2456) documents, recent empirical entrants into the study of boredom have re-​encountered well-​known challenges. Thus they find evidence of “the close relationship between boredom and decreased attention” (2018, p.  2456) and ascertain that while it is consistently correlated with “slowed time perception” (2018, p. 2454) and impaired feelings of agency (2018, p. 2455), boredom may arise from both over-​and under-​stimulation (2018, p. 2453). Less consistency is noted around the parameters of physiological arousal (while boredom often appears to be a low-​arousal state, the signatures of autonomic arousal—​ elevated heart-​rate and high electrodermal activity—​were found in a number of experiments) and in neural imaging (where a number of inconsistencies but also non-​congruencies among experiments were identified, 2018, p. 2457-​ 2459). Finally, as Raffaelli et al. remark in closing, “[b]‌oredom may be correlated with negative mood and more fatigue, however, empirical research is scarce at present. More work is needed before we can consider mood and fatigue to be consistent correlates of boredom” (2018, pp. 2459–​2460). Perhaps. But as valuable as it may be from an intradisciplinary perspective to turn boredom into a quantifiable object of study, it is not at all clear that this sort of thing qualifies as scientific progress. For anyone familiar with the experience, let alone with the history of boredom’s representations or the extensive literature reflecting on and inquiring into its vicissitudes, this all sounds rather more like a rediscovery of the wheel. The conclusions, too, are disappointingly well-​known: Raffaelli et al. venture that “assuming that individuals experience boredom in a uniform way may be hampering our understanding and further research into boredom” (2018, p. 2456) and suggest that “a more standardized operationalization of boredom” be created and “different types” of boredom be distinguished (2018, p. 2460). On the one hand, these suggestions are unassailable. If “everyone” (i.e., everyone in the discourse community of those engaged in what they recognize as “empirical study of boredom”) were to agree on a common definition, it would surely lead to more consistent and, thus, statistically speaking, more significant experimental results. In fact, though, like the profusion of contradictory

48 Goodstein findings, the manifold incompatible definitions and scales of measurement that psychologists have developed register empirical complexities and experiential ambiguities that cannot be eliminated by fiat. Even setting aside the questions of whether and how such a generalized definitional consensus could be produced, such a universally accepted “operationalization” of boredom would represent a questionable advance, for it would exclude the very ambiguities and alternative understandings that most require explanation. To operationalize these away would be to beg the question of why, in ordinary life, a range of distinct experiences actually go by this name. In proposing the second, diametrically opposed strategy of taxonomy—​of clearly distinguishing multiple distinct forms of boredom—​Raffaelli et al. tacitly acknowledge that the problems attested in their literature review cannot be resolved as long as the phenomenon is addressed in its lived complexity. The narrowed understanding of definition as operationalization is ultimately inadequate for the study of boredom since it reflects an inappropriately restricted conception of inquiry. In the case of a phenomenon so deeply tied up with the historical, cultural, and linguistic features of subjective experience as well as with global questions of meaning and identity, it is blatantly unscientific to bracket the forms of understanding and interpretation proper to traditions of reflection in those areas. Faith that empirical research will be able to resolve the challenges of interpreting historically and culturally articulated experiences and emotions is misplaced; no amount of measurement can eliminate the difficulties proper to the object of study itself. To do justice to the lived reality of boredom requires methods that can respect and account for the ambiguities embedded in its history, in the discourse, and in the experience as such. In the end, experimental psychology alone cannot suffice because, like every discipline, its perspectives, capacities, and explanatory power are limited. Human experience is complex, ambiguous, and multiple, and to approach it in a genuinely scientific way, we need to cultivate a variety of strategies for understanding and interpreting our phenomenal reality. For anyone reading the recent empirical work on boredom with a longer view of the critical literature, a series of antecedent efforts to define boredom and distinguish it from similar or related phenomena as well as various taxonomies of types of boredom will quickly spring to mind. From this perspective, it is also evident that the fMRI studies represent the latest variant of a venerable aspect of the discourse on boredom that is reductively materialist. Already, at the very outset of the modern discourse on boredom, Baudelaire himself warned against the inadequacy of reductive interpretations of ennui and skewered the methodological insufficiency of the forms of reflection they involve—​ for example, in the prose poem, “Le Mauvais Vitrier,” where he describes “that

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humor, hysterical according to the doctors, satanic according to those who think a bit more clearly than the doctors, that drives us unresistingly toward a multitude of dangerous or unseemly actions.” In fact, as I demonstrated in Experience without Qualities (2005), an approach that is reductive at its core simply cannot do justice to the historical configuration of experience reflected in the discourse on boredom, or, in particular, to the problems of meaning that arise in and through the individual encounter with boredom. To make clear how much is at stake here methodologically, in closing, I would like to reflect upon some very contemporary reasons for insisting that empirical research takes the longer and wider history of research and reflection on boredom—​ and attention—​into account. Coming to terms with the complexity borne of the historical and cultural shifts in languages of reflection embedded in the experience of boredom calls for more thoughtfully contextualized strategies of definition than an operationalized paradigm can capture. Since modern forms (and metaphorics) of subjective malaise are entangled with techno-​scientific processes and developments—​indeed, as the case of ‘attention-​deficit disorder’ vividly illustrates, they very often embody and represent the impact of the domination of technologically mediated forms of experience on individuals—​we must proceed very carefully and critically in developing universalist claims about experience as such that depend on bracketing historical and cultural context. The proliferation of boredom and melancholy, anxiety and depression in the contemporary world cannot be understood in abstraction from socio-​economic and cultural changes that are tied up with the rise of modern technoscience. In this light, it should give every thinking person pause that approaches to psychic suffering which abstract subjective experience from its historical and cultural environment are materially dependent on the very historically specific strategies and practices of (medico-​) techno-​scientific mediation that render this longer historical and cultural horizon illegible. The popular appeal of the highly processed statistical image-​artifacts used to represent the highly ambiguous results of fMRI studies is grounded in a troubling oversimplification: the illusion that imaging technologies overcome the mind/​body problem. In fact, though, the “image of boredom” reproduced above and, even more emphatically, the arrow that points to it, hail from a representational regime that is anything but securely grounded in purely statistical data. To leave historical, cultural, linguistic, and sociological evidence out of consideration by no means assures that such parameters can be adequately bracketed, let  alone eliminated by fiat. The highly mediated procedures involved in such studies not only efface the operation of such contextual factors in the initial generation of the data; they also obscure the nature and effects of

50 Goodstein such assumptions in the creation of the images that “represent” that data. As the significant methodological issues that have been raised about the underlying experimental protocols and statistical practices and assumptions in such applications of fMRI studies underline, this work is dependent on technical interventions and computerized operations embedded in programs that practitioners need not understand to use. In the context of rapidly proceeding automatization of processes that impinge on, shape, define, and channel subjective experience in virtually every arena of contemporary society, psychologists ought to proceed far more cautiously in embracing such tools. By fostering the popular fiction that the highly mediated artifacts of multiple convergent technologies of mechanical reproduction yield images of the workings of the mind, this work threatens to foreclose the discipline’s responsibility to its legacy of critical reflection on the meaning of the knowledge of human experience. While it may not appear to be the case from within the cultural world of the psychological laboratory, considerations about the historical and cultural constitution of subjective malaise are highly relevant for the assessment of studies that bracket boredom’s modernity. As we have seen, in the case of contemporary experimental psychology (as is typical in the social sciences), an ultimately idealist, ahistorical understanding of experience goes largely unexamined because it is being plugged into a scientific model that recognizes only reductively materialist causal explanations as legitimate. In work on boredom, as in other cases of psychological research on complex, embodied phenomena, scientific background assumptions authorize a focus on defining that ultimately obscures what is at stake in experiencing the phenomenon in question. Consequently, much of the current psychological literature on boredom is occupied with disputes over operational definitions and correlations, as well as the internecine difficulties arising from the co-​existence of well over a dozen competing boredom assessment scales.27 27

The claims being made for fMRI studies must be assessed in this larger context. It is noteworthy how closely the conclusions of Raffaelli et  al. cited above echo the sentiment expressed in a 2003 review of the psychometric literature, which identified 8 distinct scales for measuring boredom: “lack of an agreed-​upon definition of boredom has limited the measurement of the construct and partly accounts for the existence of diverse approaches to assessing various subsets of boredom” (Vodanovich, 2003, p. 570). In an updated literature review published in 2016, which documented a doubling in the number of boredom-​related scales in the intervening years, Vodanovich and Watt called for an end to the promulgation of scales, but remarked that the problem was not the proliferation of definitions per se. Arguing that, rather, “what is lacking is a mechanism to arrive at a professional agreement on the definition of boredom,” they declared that “a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to cultivate a unified definition of boredom is long overdue”

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The arrow confidently indicating boredom’s location in the brain scan image reproduced above is symptomatic of the consequences of such “disciplining” of subjective experience. What is under discussion in the psychological literature seems pretty far from the boredom that we indeed recognize as a “common human experience” today (Danckert and Merrifield, 2018, p. 2507). The same alienating effect also arises in far less technologically mediated studies of boredom and attempts to measure “boredom proneness,” as well. Here, however, thanks to the mediation of the fMRI machine and the experimental protocols, the experience of boredom is itself being redefined as an event in the brain, one that becomes a measurable and definable object of knowledge in and through the process by which it is “detected.” In addition to the issues already noted, I  would add that those who want to claim that boredom as such is being made legible via this experimental abstraction of an historically and culturally specific form of malaise from its discursive embeddedness in an intersubjectively articulated, culturally and historically oriented world of experience would do well to remember the lessons of Heisenberg and Einstein regarding the effects of observation on complex systems. The pursuit of knowledge takes place not just in time and space but also in culture and language. The challenges of investigating boredom illustrate, in an acute but not unique way, the consequences of the circumstance noted at the outset: since studying human experience involves using tools forged in historically particular cultural contexts, languages, and frames of reference to interpret phenomena that are themselves shaped by culture, language, and history, it is not possible to think away the cultural, historical, linguistic, and empirical limitations of perspective; every inquiry is situated in multiple and at least partly non-​transparent ways. Among the most pernicious effects of the disciplinary division of labor is that it fosters an illusion of intellectual autonomy under conditions of radical heteronomy. The case of boredom makes clear that this pretended autonomy can easily prevent us from recognizing how urgent it is to transcend the illusory security of our insular and habitual ways of knowing to come to terms with the complexity of the challenges that face us—​challenges of which boredom’s pervasiveness in our world is a ­signal case.

(2016, p. 221). However skeptical one may be about the possibilities of arriving at such an interdisciplinary consensus, it is worth underlining that no such sentiments are being expressed by those who are promoting fMRI studies as the silver bullet.

52 Goodstein

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­c hapter 2

The Multitude Strikes Back? Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism Michael E. Gardiner Abstract One of the most compelling arguments put forward by the so-​called ‘Autonomist’ tradition of Marxist thought is that the very affective and emotional register of our lives is shaped fundamentally by transformations in the production process now unfolding in the (over-​)developed societies of the global North. However, although major Autonomist thinkers have discussed such related phenomena as anxiety, depression, and indifference, none have addressed boredom directly. The central task of this chapter will be, therefore, to speculate as to how boredom, understood as a tangible, if characteristically ambivalent (and ambient) mood or affective condition, might be understood in broadly Autonomist terms. Some key questions here include: is there a specifically 21st-​century boredom? If so, does it retain any of the incipiently resistant qualities that we can find in the type of boredom more characteristic of the classical phase of Fordist capitalism? Are there qualitative changes in the way our body-​minds situate in the time-​space of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi calls ‘semiocapitalism’? Finally, how might such transformations relate to boredom, especially concerning the perpetual speed-​ up in informational and semiotic flow, and ever-​tightening and accelerating circuits of capitalist valorization?

Keywords autonomism –​ Bifo –​ boredom –​ capitalism –​ Marxism –​ Virno

1

Introduction

In recent years, I have had two occasions to visit the Republic of Ireland, both of which involved a fair amount of automotive travel. What could not be ignored about the first excursion, at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom in 2007, was that much of the driving I  witnessed bore only a casual relationship to

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56 Gardiner posted speed limits or rudimentary considerations of safety. The second trip occurred in early 2010, during the extraordinary events of the Eurozone banking crisis, when the Irish economy effectively unraveled in a matter of months. Here, my experience was strikingly different: for one thing, there seemed to be conspicuously fewer cars on the road, and the drivers, almost to a person, transported themselves slowly and mournfully as if they barely had a reason to drive anywhere. Out of curiosity, I asked several of my hosts their opinion as to the cause of this abrupt change. Not only did they immediately know what I was talking about, they all also had the same answer: the sudden recession had effectively chilled everyone out, cast a depressive pall over their hitherto over-​caffeinated, and hyper-​acquisitive lifestyle. There was no compelling reason to drive at breakneck speed to the next business appointment or shopping soirée, not only because there were fewer of such activities, but also insofar as these had lost much of their previous semblance of urgency and significance. Although anecdotal, my experience chimes neatly with one of the most compelling arguments put forward by the so-​called ‘Autonomist’ tradition of Marxist thought: namely, its insistence that virtually every aspect of modern human subjectivity, and, more precisely, the very affective and emotional registers of our lives, is shaped fundamentally by transformations in the production process that are now unfolding in the technologically-​advanced societies of the global North. As such, what we typically think of as dissociated moods, desires, and psychological affectations are anything but random or inconsequential, not least because the formation of subjectivity itself has become the privileged terrain of class struggle. “To a degree unprecedented in any other social system,” as Mark Fisher (2009, p. 35) notes, “capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations.” Of especial significance, in this regard, is the epochal shift from ‘Fordist’ to ‘post-​Fordist’ capitalism, wherein the full gamut of workers’ linguistic, cognitive, and affective capacities, mainly as they are utilized collectively in digitalized communicative networks of global range, and which were once marginal to the exigencies of production, now take center-​stage. As Paolo Virno (2004, p. 43), one of the leading lights of the Autonomist movement, suggests, there are numerous “points of identity” between our ethical and emotional life, on the one hand, and the production process, on the other, which, in turn, necessitates a properly materialist phenomenology. For several reasons, not least its implacably anti-​capitalist stance, Autonomism has had relatively little impact on the mainstream academy. As such, the principal intent of this chapter is to encourage a more thorough appreciation for and broader application of Autonomist ideas. We seek to pursue this objective by focusing on a specific issue vis-​à-​vis the more general task

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of comprehending certain critical aspects of our ‘late-​capitalist’ subjectivity: namely, that of ‘boredom.’ We can tentatively describe boredom as a state of emotional flatness and resigned indifference, something that grips us, more or less involuntarily, without necessarily having an identifiable cause, shape, or object. Although many would dismiss it as a trivial psychological condition, even a cursory glance at the history of ideas demonstrates that boredom has been subjected to considerable scrutiny by a wide range of writers and philosophers in the modern age, for whom boredom looms as an ethical and existential problem of great significance. More recently, the focus has moved away from such mostly philosophical speculations towards a more sustained investigation of the cultural, discursive, and sociological underpinnings of boredom. This fact is evidenced by an intense scholarly interest in the topic, as represented by Goodstein (2005), Dalle Pezze and Salzani (2008), and Gardiner and Haladyn (2017), but also in terms of a host of conferences, documentary films, online blogs, ‘memes,’ and so forth. Such a heightened academic and popular fascination with boredom has prompted philosopher Lars Svendsen (2005, p.  21) to suggest that “[b]‌oredom is the “privilege” of modern man [sic, and passim],” and, hence, perhaps, the default mood of our age. What Virno and others posit as a ‘materialist phenomenology’ requires us to analyze a phenomenon like boredom in relation to the organization of, and recent transformations in, the socio-​economic character of late modern societal formations. This is not an argument in favor of the old bugbear of Marxist economic reductionism but an acknowledgment that specific subjective configurations are more compatible with prevailing modes of capital accumulation than others, and that a wide range of palpable social forces—​ ideological, biopolitical, juridical—​encourage the consolidation and continual monitoring and policing of these embodied and affectively-​mediated forms of thought, expression, and action. We need, in other words, something like a political economy of the psyche. Autonomist theory arguably provides us with a rich and multifaceted set of conceptual tools and interpretive strategies well-​suited for just such an investigation. However, despite near-​unanimity concerning boredom’s omnipresence in the late modern world, what is curious is that none of the major thinkers of the Autonomist tradition talk about boredom in anything like a sustained theoretical fashion. Franco Berardi (hereafter Bifo), for instance, waxes eloquently about panic, anxiety, and depression; Virno, for his part, discourses at length on cynicism, indifference, and idleness. These phenomena are linked to—​or even incrementally shade into—boredom in important and relevant ways, but none could be said to be entirely coterminous with the experience of boredom per se. Our task here, then, will be to speculate as to how boredom, understood as a tangible if

58 Gardiner characteristically ambivalent (and ambient) mood or affective condition that relates to modes of capitalist production in specific ways, might be treated according to something broadly resembling an Autonomist perspective on this topic. Some questions I hope to address here are: is there a specifically 21st-​century boredom? If so, does it retain any of the incipiently resistant or even utopian qualities that, as has been argued elsewhere (for example, Gardiner, 2012), might be found in the type of boredom more characteristic of the classical phase of Fordist capitalism? Are there qualitative changes in the way we situate ourselves in time-​space during the era of what Bifo calls ‘semiocapitalism,’ and how might such a transformation in our body-​mind relate to boredom, especially concerning the perpetual speed-​up in such things as informational and semiotic flow, and ever-​tightening and accelerating circuits of capitalist valorization? 2

Capital and Affective Labor

Taking their cue from the remarkable passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, called “Fragment on Machines” (1973), the Autonomists argue that, as capitalism mutates into its post-​Fordist variant, abstract knowledge becomes the primary force driving the production process. One consequence is that labor and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial,’ inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems, and all aspects of the collective worker’s affective, desiring, and cognitive capabilities as located in the ‘social factory’ (or society at large) are now brought to bear on production itself. Although such changes are riddled with paradox and countervailing tendencies, Autonomists generally cast doubt upon any intrinsic connection between necessary labor time and measurable values or outputs. This is a dual consequence of the explosive growth of immaterial labor in the post-​Fordist era, involving the integration of “science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general” (Virno, 1996, p. 267) into the heart of production, but also because the circulation of digital and symbolic goods has become the norm, which effectively problematizes capitalistic notions of proprietary control and ownership. As a result of these and related factors, capitalism is plunged into ever more profound crises of overproduction, under-​consumption, and resource depletion, of which the 2008 financial collapse, and the ‘New Deal in reverse’ that followed in its wake, is only the latest and most spectacular example. Evermore intensive and violent modes of exploitation and subjectivation are marshaled to speed up the circuits of capital accumulation and compensate for such economic downturns (see Marazzi, 2011a).

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There is much debate in Autonomist circles as to what modes of resistance are possible in the current conjuncture, just how much liberatory potential new digital technologies actually have, or whether a ‘post-​politics,’ premised on Deleuzian notions of ‘lines of flight,’ might be a more suitable strategy than a head-​on confrontation with the powers that be. As important as these questions are, however, our task here is to examine more closely how these new modes of capitalist valorization create a novel kind of neoliberal political subject, especially as the latter concerns the formation of affect and mass psychology. As Christian Marazzi (2007; see also 2011b) notes, in his essay “Rules for the Incommensurable,” post-​Fordism means, above all, a transformation both in labor and what it generates. Under Fordism, workers are hyper-​exploited in the workplace but mostly left to their own devices at the end of the working day, and it is in their free time that they can foster intersubjective relations of mutual empathy and solidarity, indulge in restorative forms of leisure and recreation, and so on. In the contemporary setting, however, capital instigates a far-​ reaching process of ‘deterritorialization,’ wherein formerly discrete activities and social spheres are integrated into the demands and rhythms of production itself. Capitalism now produces not only the conditions of the workplace but the general social relations in which workers live and raise their families. Hence, the contemporary worker is involved in production not only as a laboring body but as a much broader social subject, which far exceeds the hours they spend in the workplace itself. Value is now measured and captured at every point in the production process, which requires very different sets of indicators of the sort that factory managers relied on in the Fordist phase. The new ‘fixed capital’ is quite literally the brain of the worker, or to be more precise, the general intellect of the mass cognitive worker, which is combined with living labor to make the productive activity possible. The shared intellectuality of the workforce is the crucial resource of post-​ Fordist enterprises, but the latter requires the means to identify and capture this resource and make it a tangible asset. This polarity marks the transition from formal to real subsumption:  essentially, a shift from the legal-​juridical subjugation of laborers in the workplace to the confinement of workers’ entire lives by the flows of capital accumulation through techno-​economic means. Activity in the sphere of work increasingly requires not a slavish devotion to inflexible rules in hierarchical and bureaucratic settings but rather interpretive and communicative skills that shape flows of knowledge about consumer tastes and preferences, foster problem-​solving abilities, promote individual and group initiative, and facilitate endless adaptability to the changing market and productive conditions. This fact relies much less on formal job training and credentials than a specific set of psychological and behavioral dispositions. For

60 Gardiner Bifo, this implies that semiocapitalism moves away from the disciplining of the body, which Michel Foucault identified as being of fundamental importance to the emergence of Western modernity in the era of Fordist accumulation, towards something closer to an architectonics of the soul. Here, Bifo means all the embodied, affective, and aesthetic capacities of the human being as these are manifested intersubjectively, and which have now become diffused throughout society as a whole. The subsumption of the soul, he writes, “takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value. In the sphere of digital production, exploitation is exerted essentially on the semiotic flux produced by human time at work” (Bifo, 2009a, pp. 21–​22). According to Bifo, there are clear reasons why semiocapitalism has so effectively captured the affective and cognitive qualities of immaterial labor, and this, in turn, helps to explain why neoliberalism has proven to be a strikingly hegemonic force. In the Fordist era, factory work generally does not engage the intellect, and its tasks are routinized and able to be performed by virtually anyone. Not surprisingly, work under these conditions is something malign and dehumanizing and, hence, something to avoid as much as possible. Post-​ Fordism represents a very different scenario. Since most physical operations are now automated, with computer models imaging the manipulation of matter, conception separates from the execution of tasks, and the former acquires considerably heightened importance. What this means is that cognitive workers’ relation to time changes: it no longer consists of interchangeable units of abstract labor-​power sold to the capitalist in identical blocks. Instead, different times have specific intensities, divergent investments of attention and energy, depending on the project at hand, shifting deadlines and pressures, or whether one is working at home or in an office. One consequence of this is that the cognitariat, especially the high-​tech vanguard, tend to see their labor as the most significant aspect of their lives, the closest to whom they are as distinct persons, which is very different from the experience of the industrial worker. Cognitive workers generally envisage their labor as an enterprise, the free and creative disposition of their imagination and energies, even if they are ultimately employees of a firm. The so-​called ‘enterprise culture’ has become a universal principle and the primary site of the investment of desire. Moreover, although all the available empirical evidence shows that time spent laboring, both inside and outside the workplace, has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, there has been little in the way of generalized social opposition to this trend. As Bifo (2009a, p. 78) usefully summarizes, whereas industrial workers invested mechanical energies in their wage earning services according to a depersonalized model of repetition, high tech workers invest their

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specific competences, their creative, innovative and communicative energies in the labor process; that is, the best part of their intellectual ­capacities. In part, this new-​found ‘love’ for work operates as a compensatory mechanism for the deleterious effects of neoliberal policies such as the destruction of traditional working-​class communities, the systematic transfer of public assets into private hands, a reduction of welfare provisions, and explosive growth in social inequalities. However, Bifo is adamant that this familiar narrative is not the entire story because the consolidation of semiocapitalism signals a vast cultural and psychical sea-​change as well. The cognitariat is not wholly unlike the craftsperson of old because both invest all their skills and creative energies in the production process. There are some key differences, of course, but, perhaps, there is just enough of the logic of the arcane world of the craft guild to appeal to immaterial laborers in ways that industrial work never could. In the context of the factory, workers felt robbed of their creativity and uniqueness, but in post-​Fordism, these qualities seem to be validated by work, especially in the high-​tech sector. In short, work in semiocapitalism involves the harnessing of all aspects of human imaginative and emotional life in the service of productive efficacy. Cognitive labor is communicative action put to work, which is why Jürgen Habermas’ well-​known distinction between instrumental and communicative reason no longer holds water (see Hardt, 1999). Lest there be a potential misunderstanding here, Bifo and other Autonomists are acutely aware that all manner of invidious distinctions and inequities are involved in the deployment of cognitive labor. Much of it, such as data entry, is rote and mechanical in nature, which is why we have to distinguish between ‘brain workers,’ involving people who work in such areas as cutting-​edge software design or media production, as opposed to “chain workers,” of a sort found predominantly in retail or service industries (Bifo, 2009a, p. 87). Furthermore, it does not mean that degrading forms of manual labor have simply disappeared, although they tend to shift to less developed territories and regions, or that the ‘immateriality’ of cognitive work does not concern bodies at all (although for Bifo and others the nature of our embodiment does change in significant ways). Regardless, there are three main aspects of Bifo’s position relevant to our concerns here: 1) first, the role of digital technologies in the production process; 2) second, the effects of semiocapitalism on our experience of temporality; and 3) third, how such transformations are registered in our subjective lives, especially the mass psychopathologies that seem to be pervasive in 21st-​century life. In the first case, what is essential is that a network of digital infrastructures contains virtually all work today. Exploitation is no longer exercised in

62 Gardiner hierarchical systems found in specific physical sites—​such as the factory—​but has a “transversal, deterritorialized function, permeating every fragment of labor time” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 88). Work might be vaunted today as a self-​directed activity of intrinsic value, but, although formal hierarchies and clear-​cut directives are primarily gone, what takes their place is arguably more insidious and all-​encompassing, conforming to a ‘chain of automatisms’ embedded in a network. These coordinate each subjective aspect of the worker, every deployment of desire and attention, suturing them into a totalizing but fluid and endlessly manipulable process. Hence, the key for Autonomists like Bifo is not the automation of production per se, which has been happening for a long time, but rather its computerization. Digital technologies are capable of modeling every event or process in infinitely replicable ways, thereby creating virtualities that effectively reduce the production process to bits and bytes of information. For Bifo (2009a, p. 77), this means the emergence of something resembling a new form of “bio-​info-​production.” Fordist techniques had ‘autonomic’ sub-​systems and cybernetic modes of information monitoring and retrieval, but such individual sub-​units were not linked via a quasi-​biological info-​sphere, akin to the neurons connecting the brain into an organic whole. The feedback loops of systems theory mesh with biogenetics to create a new post-​human landscape, as the digital nervous system progressively insinuates itself into its organic counterpart, recodifying the latter to suit its own needs. The info-commodity depends on the synergetic union between the collective brain of the cognitariat and the network, but the human body-​mind has to undergo a process of far-​reaching recomposition. One way to integrate workers effectively into these information systems is to have them always at the beck and call of their employers through smartphones, text messaging, and emails that are expected to be heeded and responded to at any moment. The result is that time itself is parceled out, or ‘fractalized,’ broken down into tiny fragments that can be recombined in an infinite number of ways depending on the specific productive tasks at hand. The central issue here is that the deterritorializing effects of capital have occurred more quickly than the time needed for workers to rebuild their communities and invent new forms of solidarity and resistance. What Bifo (2009a, p. 140) calls wealth as time—​that is, “time to enjoy, travel, learn and make love”—​has now largely disappeared. What we have, instead, is the infinite “production of scarcity and need, compensated by a fast, guilty and neurotic consumption because we can’t waste time; we need to get back to work” (2009a, p. 82). In this context, the subsumption of mental labor to the exigencies of production reduces the former to pure abstraction, and we sacrifice our very temporality at the altar of exchange-​value. Our bodies and minds are put to work in an atmosphere of extreme unpredictability

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and precariousness where, as mentioned, time itself is dispersed and fractalized. This phenomenon leads to the attenuation of our sensuous, empathic, and erotic connection to others and the world at large. Another Autonomist, Franco Piperno, makes the valuable point that the speed and functioning of the computer constitutes a realm that is virtually unrepresentable for human beings. The computer is an entirely different entity than its predecessors, the tool and the clock. So long as we subordinate the tool or machine to human labor, it follows the contours of the human body and its essential rhythms. When the clock predominates, the body reconciles with an invariant mechanical temporality—​the classic cinematic image in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis comes to mind, in which workers laboring in deep underground facilities are forced to move in tandem, with a machinic inevitability, until extreme mental and physical fatigue sets in. However, there is no such human scale or comparison vis-​à-​vis the computer because it operates close to ‘optic time,’ and its duration is boundless, infinite. The arrival of the computer, therefore, results in what Piperno (1996, p.  124) calls a “gigantic dilation” of the present time. When the principles of speed and an ‘operative culture’ predominate, individuals find it increasingly difficult to step back, meditate on, and take stock of their shared conditions of life and possibly envisage alternative ways of being. Here, theories or interpretations are superfluous: the only thing that matters is the efficacy of simulations and modeling and the haste by which databases can be accessed. The main point should be clear enough: that post-​Fordist time is no longer a cumulative and future-​orientated process, but rather what Virno (2007, p. 45) calls a “phantasmagoric ensemble of simultaneous opportunities, to be negotiated with flexibility.” In this situation, the veneer of a civilizational humanism, with its deep roots in European history and culture—​and which had hitherto operated as a partial brake on, or, at least, compensation for, the brutalities of class exploitation and imperialism—​have been stripped away, leaving the mechanisms of naked economic compulsion and militarized violence to run riot. According to Autonomist theory, although the subsumption of workers’ affective and cognitive capacities in immaterial labor is potentially enriching, the transformation in production under semiocapitalism has been brought about only at enormous psychic, affective, and experiential cost. That is because communication becomes an ‘economic necessity’ rather than a mode of interaction that fosters aesthetic, empathic, and erotic ties between people. A more enlightened deployment of high technology could liberate humankind from virtually all burdensome work and free up our creative and cooperative capacities for much more ennobling pursuits. However, the futile measure of ‘necessary labor time’ carries on a ghostly afterlife in post-​Fordism, imposing entirely unnecessary

64 Gardiner hierarchies, exploitations, and redundant bureaucratic mentalities on a wholly transformed socio-​cultural sphere. Since labor time correlates with income and its logic shapes the production process and the distribution of its rewards, the paradoxical result is that millions are now ‘surplus to requirements’ and cast into the shadowy world of non-​work. Moreover, unless we want to end up as what Zygmunt Bauman (2004) calls ‘social waste,’ and become shunned and powerless non-​consumers, we are forced to take part, to direct all our skills and energies into a ferocious, and ultimately unwinnable, competition. Bifo minces no words here: unlike ‘liberal’ democratic societies that allow for at least the limited individual pursuit of relative happiness, post-​Fordist capitalism is a ‘totalitarian’ social order. This is so not only in its all-​encompassing reach—​which is both extensive, or global, and intensive, saturating all of everyday life—​but also inasmuch as it harkens back to the Stalinist or fascistic expectation that all citizens must participate enthusiastically in what our society defines as the only possible avenue to happiness (Bifo, 2009a). Hell is now other people, not because of some timeless existential conundrum, but because everyone else is an actual or potential competitor in the zero-​sum game of contemporary economic life, where there can only be a few winners and many losers. Wealth is no longer understood (as it was in previous centuries) as the leisurely cultivation of various pleasures and enjoyments, primarily through friendship and Eros, but is equated entirely with financial success and patterns of avaricious consumption. If the key to semiocapitalism is the subsumption of human desires and affects in ways that directly augment modes of capitalist accumulation, for Bifo it means that the traditional Freudo-​Marxian concept of ‘alienation’—​which posits the repression of ‘authentically’ human essences leading to neurotic symptoms, which only need to be released or ‘liberated’ by dialectical fiat to bring about universal happiness and fulfillment—​must now be abandoned. Instead, we have today an introjection of desire, which itself has no ‘natural’ or inherently resistant quality, into a neo-​baroque super-​expressivity of signs, virtualities, and simulations. As Fisher (2009, p. 15) notes, the principle of “capitalist realism” avoids the identification with the stern, killjoy Father who forbids enjoyment, which was, of course, the defining feature of Max Weber’s ascetic Protestantism. Instead, post-​Fordism is the hip uncle imploring us to ‘just do it,’ seeking endless new ways to be titillated and entertained. For Fisher, this leads to ‘hedonic lassitude,’ the inability to seek anything but an immediacy of pleasure, in a context of generalized anomie and fractalized time. Capitalism might well be a shadowy and abstract system that eludes easy comprehension, but, like the zombie or vampire, it requires living bodies and minds on which to feed; it needs our complicity at some level and could not operate without

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it. Such a process is exceedingly difficult to disrupt, or even to recognize as such: we cannot storm the Winter Palace any longer because it is now part of the very warp and woof of our collective body-​mind. Perhaps more germane to our concerns here, however, are Bifo’s arguments about the progressive abstraction of the body and its capacities, as well as the close connection between the perpetual speedup of info-​capitalism on the one hand and our affective orientations on the other. As to the former, with the digitalization of production, economic practices and measures of value become wholly detached from the ‘real’ world and constitute an utterly hermetic self-​referential system of signs and simulations. What governs this bubble of hyper-​reality are not ‘rational’ predictions or hypotheses based on empirical evidence, but rather flows and intensities of mood: fears and obsessions, fantastical projections, and myriad wish-​fulfillments. Similarly, for capital, the worker is not an integral and embodied person but the producer of micro-​fragments of “recombinant semiosis that enter into the continuous flux of the Net” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 80). As such, the human body and our physical needs become a mere residue, an afterthought. Concerning the second of these factors, the constant acceleration of info-​capitalism has a profound effect on human affect—​specifically, we are asked to process escalating amounts of information and simultaneously engage in more and more tasks, to be always ‘on,’ even in our ostensibly ‘free’ time. As Virno (2004, p. 12) reminds us, value-​ creation in post-​Fordism relies on the differential between paid and unpaid work and hence located in “the idle time of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of material labor.” However, we are increasingly unable to modulate this overwhelming flow of signs and data, mainly because our very organicity is unable to keep pace with the rapid-​fire unfolding of digital or computer time, and hence there is a ‘paradigmatic discrepancy’ between transmissions emanating from the info-​sphere and their reception by the human perceptual-​cognitive apparatus. In a nutshell, hyper-​stimulation and the relentless exploitation of labor suck all the self’s desiring energies into the black hole of info-​capitalism. A prevalent response to this situation is a vague but generalized sense of unease and anxiety. Of course, in Western societies, there is a vast armory of pharmacological techniques that can be brought to bear on this condition, but these provide only partial and temporary relief. Over the run of a ‘bull market,’ traders and functionaries of capital struggle to keep the investment hype and euphoria going by recourse to cocaine, amphetamines, or alcohol. This phenomenon cannot be sustained indefinitely, and when the crash comes, which it always does, an overwhelming sense of panic is the inevitable next stage, followed by an emotional and bodily collapse—​or more simply put, depression. Then,

66 Gardiner drugs like Prozac or Xanax come to the fore—​indeed, it is estimated that (for example) half the population of the United Kingdom use prescription or illicit drugs to treat anxieties or depressive illnesses (see Fisher, 2009). Bifo notes that we used to understand depression as an age-​old ‘sad wisdom,’ an experience of moral suffering that had to be painstakingly worked through by the subject with one’s intimates. Now, depression is an impediment to action; in a world where constant reinvention and self-​actualization are the only measures of personal worth, depression must be ‘cured’ as quickly as possible, or, at least, contained in a way that does not compromise the intensive employment of our psychic energies in work and consumption. With the onset of depression, the exchange relation with the world—​and the narcissistic passion that sustains it—​is severed. Panic and depression are thus two stages of the same general process: both are designed to protect the organism from a calamitous over-​investment of energies without palpable returns. Depression, therefore, contains more than a grain of truth because it manifests a “vision of the abyss represented by the absence of meaning” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 129). The twist in Bifo’s tale here is that he is not arguing that economic crises lead directly to anxiety or depression. If anything, it is the reverse that is true:  the global economy collapsed in 2008 because our collective body-​mind could no longer sustain the relentlessly supercharged mental and physical activism demanded by an unchecked process of capital accumulation (Bifo, 2009b). 3

Boredom and Semiocapitalism

To recapitulate the main argument thus far: what makes post-​Fordism or semiocapitalism distinctive and so apparently ‘successful’ is that we are integrated into the world of hyper-​work and hyper-​consumption—​which, as Marazzi (2008) contends, are now merely different moments of valorization within the same endlessly looping process—​via a series of internalized techno-​social automatisms. That is not to imply that mechanisms of exploitation have no limits whatever. The notion of ethico-political restraints on the relentless extraction of surplus-​value from the social and natural worlds might be a quaint anachronism today, but humans are arguably constrained in specific ways by our biological and cognitive make-​up. We cannot forever endure the perpetual ratcheting up of the speed and intensity of info-​capitalism and the constant oscillation between euphoria and depression, boom and bust, which is its defining characteristic. Semiocapitalism might efficiently capture our energy and attention, but this can also result in dyslexia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other disorders, which negate our ability to process information

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intelligibly and implement effective strategies of action. Ultimately, most Autonomists argue that the general intellect is poorly suited for the regime of techno-​capitalism and the wholly privatized interests it now serves. This is the reason why Bifo (2007, p.  79) posits the idea of imminent “collapse,” a “psychotic meme” resulting from the catastrophic depletion of natural resources, the crushing personal and collective debt that afflicts us all (see Lazzarato, 2012), and the utter exhaustion of the social brain. ‘Solutions’ to this state of affairs are hardly self-​evident: interestingly enough, Bifo’s prognostications themselves lurch jarringly from profound negativity to euphoric optimism and back again. But he does, in a manner not unlike his compatriot Virno, advocate some form of post-​politics that is much closer in spirit to psychoanalytical modes of ‘therapy’ than the militant activism of past leftist struggles—​indeed, the latter might well be symptomatic of the ‘permanent electrocution’ and overstimulation of semiocapitalism itself, and hence more poison than cure. We are unable to delve more deeply into Bifo’s remarks on political questions here, but a couple of points he makes in this context might provide a useful segue into our discussion of boredom per se. If capital organizes and subsumes the energies flowing from our thoughts, moods, and affects, how can this overinvestment of desire and the destructive hyper-​exploitation of the human organism be short-​circuited, or, at least, partially decelerated? Here, Bifo’s distinction between the ‘virtual class’ and the cognitariat might be relevant. The former spends most of its time in cyberspace and is prone to many of the afflictions discussed above—​such as the attenuation of physical embodiment, a desexualized form of ‘frigid thought,’ and the pursuit of off-​the-​shelf narcotized happiness. The virtual class is part of the general intellect, but lacks any self-​consciousness of this fact and makes no strides towards forming an actual community (or at best constitutes an agglomeration of like-​minded solipsists). Although there are no absolute distinctions between them, unlike the virtual class, the cognitariat is dually composed of proletarian and cognitive labor and, hence, more grounded in the ‘real’ world. As such, it retains an element of physicality and embodied sensuality, and strives in more self-​aware terms to create viable human communities by forging aesthetic, moral, and erotic relations with others. Put differently, the experiential reality of the cognitariat is not reducible to intellectuality (although its collective intellect is crucial) (Bifo, 2009a). Perhaps it is in the body-​mind of the cognitive worker where the germ of an ‘antibody’—​at least somewhat resistant to the pathologies of semiocapitalism—​can be located. If networked human minds cannot be as effortlessly uploaded into global circuits of information and flows of capital as the architects of our brave new world might assume, what forms

68 Gardiner of corporeal-​affective deceleration, or ‘libidinal slowdown,’ could conceivably exist in this context? On one of the very few occasions Bifo mentions boredom specifically, he asserts that work in the Fordist factory, due to its physically demanding and monotonous character, and the fact it does not substantially engage the worker’s communicative or creative capacities, is “characterized mainly by boredom and pain” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 84). Fordism, as discussed, primarily utilizes and disciplines the body, while the soul is left to atrophy. Boredom is felt acutely by the factory laborer in the face of mindless routine and mechanized repetition, but this is confined to the industrial setting; life outside the workplace could still nurture human feeling and connection. In post-​Fordism, the soul and its affective-​communicative capacities are engaged, but the sensing and loving body is increasingly marginalized, and we are faced with very different problems: informational superabundance and an excess of communicability, and the formation of a “psychotic, panic-​driven character” susceptible to mental exhaustion and depression (Bifo, 2009a, p. 183). This account dovetails in intriguing ways with the discussion of boredom in Orrin E. Klapp’s classic sociological study from 1986, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society. Klapp’s work is prescient insofar as he looked at the explosive growth of the information society during the formative years of what we now call neoliberalism and how this affects our emotional and moral lives. He concludes that boredom is primarily the result of a dearth of intelligible signs and symbols (or, what has the same effect, a tedious redundancy that reveals no new significances), or, much more commonly today, a superfluity of meanings that overwhelm the perceiver because we lack the time, or the appropriate ‘filtering’ capacities to be able to make sense of this information adequately. The first of these corresponds to what Klapp (1986, p. 1) terms ‘banalization;’ the second to ‘noise,’ and, together, they “outstrip the ‘slow horse’ of meaning.” What this might be taken to imply is that boredom, in the classic Fordist era, mainly concerns bodily fatigue through physical enervation and mental under-​stimulation. Formerly varied activities are subjected to the tyranny of a universal clock-​time and individual experiences, at least, under the sway of industrial labor, become repetitive, interchangeable, and bereft of meaning. It is not confined to workers as such because mechanization and routinized motion become a generalized template for modern life. “Factory labor,” as Walter Benjamin (1999, p. 106) once pointed out, is the “economic infrastructure of the ideological boredom of the upper classes.” Arguably, this conforms to Bifo’s characterization of the Marxist theory of alienation, which posits a separation between subject and object, life and labor. The situation is different in post-​ Fordism because the subject-​object duality dissolves into endless simulations

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and virtualities, and the worker integrates into bio-​info-​production through a process of Baudrillardian ‘seduction.’ This fact reflects an epochal shift from command to control societies, wherein our “desiring energy is trapped in the trick of self-​enterprise, our libidinal investments are regulated according to economic rules, our attention is captured in the precariousness of virtual networks” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 24). For Autonomists like Bifo, this means that we must replace residual Hegelian categories of Marxist humanism by concepts derived from the psychopathology of desire and biopolitics, which helps to explain why he prefers the problematic of ‘estrangement’ over that of alienation. Although we typically use the terms interchangeably, Bifo argues that alienation implies passivity because workers are subjected to external forces that rob them of control over their work and the fruits of their labor, leading to a profound sense of loss and metaphysical homelessness. Estrangement, by contrast, turns more on the idea of an active confrontation between the collective body-​mind and its external conditions of existence through which the worker strives to create an “autonomous consciousness based on the refusal of its own dependence on work” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 23). Alienation concerns the subject’s inability to realize its human essence through self-​directed creative activity due to prevailing socio-​economic conditions, whereas estrangement emphasizes the flight from work because, in the context of semiocapitalism, laborers’ affective and cognitive abilities are subject to an all-​consuming process of real subsumption. It follows that the boredom more typical of 21st-​century life reflects a situation of information overkill and the hyper-​enervation of desire rather than the enforced repetition of bodily motion and a dearth of communicative engagement. In the former case, the info-​sphere confronts us as indistinguishable ‘white noise’ part of the ‘generalized indeterminacy’ and semiotic chaos that is the central characteristic of cognitive capitalism itself. Perhaps, boredom, which used to flow primarily from the workplace and leach outwards, is now immanent in society as a whole since all of life is now invested in the operations of the social factory. According to Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, boredom is a mere side effect of the ‘hedonic lassitude’ that pervades our late-​capitalist society, something that happens when our umbilical connection to the ‘soft narcosis’ of digital entertainment, drugs (licit and illicit), or untrammeled access to information on demand is threatened. “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix,” he writes, “is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus” (Fisher, 2009, p. 24). This is more than a simple lack of motivation or laziness but an indication of our incapacity to stitch moments into meaningful narratives, which is itself a consequence of the slicing and dicing of temporality into infinitely recombinable and commodifiable fragments.

70 Gardiner However, we can argue that boredom is not a straightforward either-​or affective state but a more complex phenomenon existing in a state of dynamic flux and constitutive ambivalence. By this latter interpretation, boredom is a symptom of our present malaise, as Fisher conclusively demonstrates, but might also represent an index of frustration with the status quo and an inchoate desire for a different way of living. If we understand boredom as an unstable continuum, then, at one end of the spectrum, we might experience slight if indefinable irritation or discomfort, but, on the other, more acute forms of boredom could be said to shade into depression, which it arguably has more in common with than anxiety or panic. The connection between boredom and depression has been commented on by several authors; some even suggest that boredom simply is a mild or low-​level form of depression, a relative and temporary psychical decoupling from the world, as opposed to the existential suffering of a profoundly depressive state (see Toohey, 2011; Svendsen, 2012). For Bifo, as the reader will recall, depression is an involuntary way for the organism to detach flows of desire from the atmosphere of dread and panic that surrounds cultural and socio-​economic hyper-​acceleration, to wrest a degree of autonomy, however limited and intuitive, from the processes of capitalist subjectification. From a therapeutic standpoint, the goal of addressing the problem of depression would not be to merely return the distressed individual to normalcy, which is what most pharmaceutical or psychiatric treatments are designed to do. It fails to address the ultimate causes, nor dispel the endless, obsessive behavioral and mental repetitions that provoked the depressive state in the first place. Instead, the depressed individual should be encouraged to envisage “other landscapes, to change focus, to open new paths of imagination” (Bifo, 2009a, p.  215). Then, we need to mitigate the chaotic velocity of semiocapitalism, reduce its overheated circuits to manageably human dimensions, but without losing complexity or compromising the unique singularity of each person. From this standpoint, calls to simplify one’s life, to recycle more or downsize one’s house or possessions, are ineffectual because they do not fundamentally address the nihilism at the heart of capitalism. It is our suggestion here that boredom, under the aegis of semiocapitalism, has at least some of the qualities that Bifo attributes to depression, though in a less dramatic and, therefore, perhaps, more hopeful and agential fashion. As hinted at previously, we might characterize boredom as a mood or psychic disposition that points to a sense of inchoate lack, disaffection, or frustration vis-​à-​vis the world as it is currently presented to us. The nullity of meaning we experience while bored entails an inability to identify things of significance or interest mainly because everything appears wrapped in the thick, deadening layers of what Benjamin (1999, p. 105) calls a “warm, gray fabric.” As Benjamin

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also notes, the commodity-​world (and now info-​sphere) of the ever-​new that seeks to continually engage our attention to amuse and entertain, but also to affect our seamless integration as enthusiastic workers and consumers into the prevailing social order, eventually adopts the tone of weary, bored insouciance. One “who lives in the semblant world of the new and ever identical,” Benjamin (1999, p. 916) asserts, “has a constant companion: boredom.” In a sense, then, some aspects of boredom do more or less passively reflect what John Rhym (2012, p. 482) terms the “negation of significance and emotion” resulting from the frenzied circuits of semiocapitalism. However, other manifestations of boredom might more actively refract or torque this socio-​economic reality in more complicated ways, gesturing, however obscurely or inarticulately, towards something more than just vague unease or dissatisfaction. We might speculate that this disguised wish for something other is an alternative way of experiencing time. In post-​Fordism, time is usurped from the worker and completely depersonalized; here, all of the everyday/​night is subjected to a relentless ‘semiotic activation’ through which capital can generate productivity on demand. If post-​Fordist time has become ‘unhinged,’ it is because, as Virno notes, we can no longer distinguish work from any other human activity, in which case even allegedly spare time “takes the form of urgency” that stretches out to an undifferentiated plane of monotony (Virno, 2004, pp. 102–​103; see also 2007, p. 20). In this situation, there is no possibility for pure idleness or playfulness that is not permeated with ‘hedonic lassitude’ and, hence, autonomous from the overarching forces of capital accumulation. Boredom, as many have noted, has an intimate relation to corporeally experienced time. In the German language, after all, boredom is designated by the term Langeweile—​ literally, ‘a long while.’ Martin Heidegger argued, in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, that we can interpret profound or existential boredom as a way of groping towards a different way of relating to time, a more discerning attunement to the way in which temporality itself unfolds with respect to Being, allowing us to understand and cultivate what he called the “feeling of time” (1995, p.  80). As Jonathan Crary (2013, p.  9) reminds us, such a realignment of attention is especially urgent now, insofar as social and natural rhythms have become entirely subordinated to a “non-​social model of machinic performance,” which is effectively a “time of indifference.” 4

Conclusions

Perhaps, then, boredom in the age of immaterial labor is the collective body-​ mind’s way of warning us of the need to slow things down. It is the ‘miserable

72 Gardiner residue’ of a flawed and fleshy humanness in an increasingly digitalized post-​ human world. Semiocapitalism exploits the soul for its ends, but, in many respects, it is less resilient than the body operating the assembly line. Bifo says the desiring body and its affects cannot be forever sidelined and reduced to an abstract fragment of disposable time endlessly recodified and reprogrammed. It rebels, and not always in a ‘nice’ way, insofar as the specter of a ‘postmodern fascism’ is ever-​present (see Bifo, 2012). Despite individual differences, Autonomists seem in full agreement that what we need at the present conjuncture is not ‘full employment,’ the usual mantra of the left. To pursue this goal would add more fuel to the all-​consuming fire of semiocapitalism: by investing the totality of our affective and mental energies in work, what withers on the vine is genuine human contact, eroticism, and empathy. Instead, we should encourage the widespread refusal of work because to repair the social fabric we require a “massive reduction in work-​time, a prodigious liberation of life from the social factory” (Bifo, 2009a, p. 219). Our argument, however tentative, is that those specific manifestations of boredom ‘sanction’ this refusal; but in largely pre-​conscious or autonomic ways—​which is perhaps not surprising if Bifo is correct in suggesting that subjectification now operates at the level of techno-​social automatisms and the seduction of desire, rather than through overt coercion or ideological persuasion. The question then becomes:  how do we interrupt the social investment of desire in the obsessive repetitions of hyper-​work and hyper-​consumption? Can we create different valences of affect in which pleasures and enjoyments can unfold at our own pace, and on our terms, leading to what Bifo (2009a, p. 137) calls a “happy singularization of the self”? There are no easy answers to these questions but, perhaps, one way to address them in these concluding remarks is through a brief consideration of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ insightful essay “On Being Bored.” Here, Phillips understands boredom as a mechanism of psychic protection, a subconscious delaying tactic or mode of interruption that comes to the fore when subjects are unsure about what they want, or what path of action to take up concerning what they desire. In such a fluid and ambivalent situation, boredom is a transitional or ‘threshold’ experience that mentally prepares the self for what to do next. “Boredom,” writes Phillips (1993, p. 69), “is integral to the process of taking one’s time,” and hence presents itself to us not only as incapacity or hesitation but also opportunity. Of course, Phillips is mainly talking about psychological disturbances concerning intra-​familial or intimate life, but, since Autonomism is steeped in psychoanalytical concepts, we could extend this germ of an idea to the fate of humanity concerning current socio-​economic processes. What is interesting is that the Autonomist theory envisages this very possibility: it

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argues that emotional or affective life is becoming a common substratum of our shared being, not merely an assortment of individual psychological profiles, primarily because of the way the economy organizes all aspects of existence in the social factory. Post-​Fordism is not merely a system of production but an entire way of life, a “social, anthropological and ethical cluster” (Virno, 2004, p. 49). The boredom of the individual worker, in other words, could be said to resonate on some level with the multitude as a whole and, while the present mood certainly tips its hat to the status quo, it also manifests “dreams of revolt” (Virno, 1996, p. 30). Might boredom, in some small way, help to protect us from the threat of chaos, the annihilation of meaning that semiocapitalism always teeters on the brink of? Could it allow us to, at least, envisage the possibility of hitching ourselves to the ‘slow horse of meaning’ rather than being overwhelmed by the hermeneutical nihilism of info-​capitalism? Any such claims can only remain relatively speculative and abstract in the context of our discussion here. We may also need to consider the distinct possibility that boredom is less a portal to more critical ways of thinking and acting than a coping mechanism by which workers, especially in the service or data industries, inure themselves to stultifying, dead-​end jobs, and ‘just get on’ with the tasks at hand, however meaningless these might ultimately be. To be sure, however, being bored is a kind of refusal to acquiesce wholly to what Bifo regards as the ‘totalitarian’ injunction to invest all our dreams and desires in such forms of work and to be relentlessly happy in our subjection. Boredom, in this sense, is a demotivating factor concerning the indefatigable and constantly expanding demands of productivity and consumption in an environment of pitilessly aggressive competitiveness. It is a form of ordinary and everyday unhappiness that throws some grit in the cogs of the techno-​social automatisms through which modern capitalism operates, and is perhaps preferable to the more acutely debilitating forms of panic or anxiety that Bifo analyzes in detail. At one point, he suggests that “[a]‌utonomy is the independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism” (Bifo, 2009b, p. 75), and the ‘laziness’ or idleness fostered by boredom might be considered as a ‘slow affectivity’ that enables us to better cultivate sensibility and empathy, roughly what the Ancient Greeks meant by aisthesis, a corporeal disclosure of the sensible world through which intra-​and interpersonal meaning and value is actively formulated. Admittedly, boredom understood in this way might be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the realization of genuinely transformative social possibilities. By way of developing a recognizably Autonomist position vis-​à-​vis such negative affective states as boredom, we must accept that purely individual adaptations, self-​help techniques, and sincere (if largely ineffectual)

74 Gardiner resistances are destined to fail because they do not go beyond the confines of our privatized and commodified life experience. They are, by turns, palliative, accommodating, or frustrated, evincing only a partial and largely mystified understanding of how our economic system induces the fragmentation, homogenization, and quantification of space-​time in the service of capital accumulation. In other words, although it might seem to be an entirely ineffable, subjective, and incommunicable experience, boredom is symptomatic of much more profound social currents that can be uncovered and grasped theoretically through the ‘materialist phenomenology’ mentioned above. Put differently, there can only be collective solutions to the libidinal disinvestment that boredom might represent, which, for Bifo and other like-​minded thinkers in the Autonomist tradition, is simultaneously a political, cultural, and psychotherapeutic project hinging on the growing awareness of the inherently social nature of the general intellect and of the “commonality of knowledge, [the] ideological crisis of private ownership, [and] communalization of need” (Bifo, 2011, p. 151).

Bibliography

Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge/​London: The Belknap Press. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’). (2007). Schizo-​Economy. Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 112, 36 (1), pp. 76–​85. doi: 10.1353/​sub.2007.0001. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’). (2009a). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’). (2009b). Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-​Alpha Generation. London: Minor Compositions. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’). (2011). After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press. Berardi, F. (‘Bifo’). (2012). What About the Dark Side of Multitude? Journal of Communication Inquiry 35 (4), pp. 310–​312. doi: 10.1177/​0196859911419255. Crary, J. (2013). 24/​7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London/​New York: Verso. Dalle Pezze, B., and Salzani, C., eds. (2008). Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Gardiner, M.E. (2012). Henri Lefebvre and the “Sociology of Boredom.” Theory, Culture and Society 29 (2), pp. 37–​62. doi: 10.1177/​0263276411417460. Gardiner, M.E., and Haladyn, J.J., eds. (2017). Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives. London/​New York: Routledge.

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Goodstein, E. (2005). Experience without Qualities:  Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hardt, M. (1999). Affective Labor. Boundary 2, 26 (2), pp. 89–​100. Heidegger, M. (1995). Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington/​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Klapp, O.E. (1986) Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society. New York/​Westport: Greenwood Press. Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, C. (2007). Rules for the Incommensurable. Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 112, 36 (1), pp. 11–​36. doi: 10.1353/​sub.2007.0014. Marazzi, C. (2008). Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, C. (2011a). The Violence of Finance Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, C. (2011b). Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom: A Lively History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Phillips, A. (1993). On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Cambridge:  Yale University Press. Piperno, F. (1996). Technological Innovation and Sentimental Education. In: P. Virno, and M. Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 123–​130. Rhym, J. (2012). Towards a Phenomenology of Cinematic Mood:  Boredom and the Affect of Time in Antonioni’s L’eclisse. New Literary History 43 (3), pp. 477–​501. doi: 10.2307/​23358876. Svendsen, L. (2005). A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books. Svendsen, L. (2012). Moods and the Meaning of Philosophy. New Literary History 43 (3), pp. 419–​431. doi: 10.2307/​23358873. Virno, P. (1996). The Ambivalence of Disenchantment. In: P. Virno, and M. Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 13–​34. Virno, P. (2004). A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Virno, P. (2007). Post-​Fordist Semblance. Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 112, 36 (1), pp. 42–​46. doi: 10.1353/​sub.2007.0024.

­c hapter 3

Boredom: a Political Issue George García Quesada Abstract This chapter examines the concept of boredom in several philosophers in the line from German Idealism to Western and contemporary Marxism, relating the changes in this concept to successive social transformations. We thus propose a periodization for the conceptualization of boredom, which allows us to highlight the historicity of the concepts of boredom in philosophy and their inherent political (utopian) content. In this overview, we find two fundamental concepts of boredom: emptiness-​boredom and repetition-​boredom. These concepts are related to different treatments of boredom from these authors, oscillating between its praise as a long time for subjective introspection and its denunciation as a symptom of alienated time. Finally, we draw some considerations about time and boredom in contemporary societies.

Keywords boredom –​contemporary societies –​German Idealism –​Marxism

1

Introduction

Although often considered as a universal non-​historical state of mind, a closer examination of boredom shows that it is intimately related to broader issues of social organization, because its discussion belongs to the problematization of social time. This experience thus relies on the subject’s class situation because time is a social resource distributed according to the outcomes of the social conflict between its members. The assessment of boredom—​perceived as a long time, as in its German term, Langeweile—​depends firstly on how we consider this availability or lack of time. As Marx (1993, p. 173) has indicated, [e]‌conomy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_005

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a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. In terms of its desirability, we analyze boredom as a means of alienation or human appropriation, and the possible positions regarding it rely on different utopian horizons, each having to do with how the subject can best appropriate time. In modernity, specifically, boredom has had a complicated relationship with social emancipation:  boredom—​as Osborne (2008) has argued—​has served a utopian function, but it has also been conceived as the radical negation of human creative possibilities. Hence, although boredom has not been a cardinal concept in Marxism and critical theory, it has often been an indicator of different stances about the appropriation of the human experience of time and makes explicit other anthropological conceptions of the authors dealing with it. In this measure, boredom is, as we will argue, a profoundly political theme whose political implications are clear through questions such as: what is boredom? Who gets bored? Or, more precisely, who can get bored? Is boredom a gateway for the realization of human potentialities, or is it just a dead-​end into frustration? What are the humanly fulfilling alternatives to boredom? In these regards, the Marxist critical tradition established a particularly fruitful dialogue with the philosophy of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism. An overview of the treatment of boredom from German Idealism to contemporary critical theory will help us to better determine the reach of the conceptualization of boredom concerning its social and political implications, and to formulate some conclusions about boredom in our contemporary societies. 2

German Idealism: Poetry and Abstraction

Svendsen (2005) has argued that boredom becomes an important theme within the Romantic era, when, he indicates, it spread to all social strata and found broad forms of expression. Thus, like Romanticism, boredom emerged in Western Europe both as a philosophical topic and a massive social phenomenon with the actuality and the expectations of industrial capitalist development (Williams, 1960; Hobsbawm, 1996).

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The early 19th-​century German philosophy defined boredom through two different conceptual principles:  emptiness and repetition. When related to the human experience of time, on the one hand, emptiness-​based boredom refers to inactivity and makes, thus, a reference to an excess of leisure time. Repetition, on the other hand, leads to a concept of boredom whose source is not inactivity but the activity of a specified kind—​alienated activity. Hence, in broad terms, the former principle implies that boredom is a condition of the economic or intellectual elites, while the latter leads to its consideration as an experience of the working class or the masses. However, these social implications remained implicit in the approach of these authors. Romanticism characterized boredom as a result of an excess of free time and, in so far, as conceived concerning indifference and idleness, it was firmly related to the medieval acedia (Svendsen, 2005, pp.  49–​50). However, while in the Middle Ages, it appears mostly as a problem for clerics, in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it is depicted concerning the economically well-​off and in close relation to inactivity. As Jameson (1997, p. 7) has indicated, the Romantics mourned the aristocratic world; after all, who could afford to be idle at that time? Thus, one of the earliest appearances of this topic, in that period, was Goethe’s praise in his 1790 Venetian Epigrams (2018): All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses: But I ignored them: my girl was in my arms. Now I’ve left my sweetheart: and they’ve left me, And I roll my eyes, seeking a knife or rope. But Heaven is full of gods: You came to aid me: Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse. Boredom appears here as emptiness, as an absence—​both of the loved ones and inspiration; however, it is important to observe that, for Goethe, this emptiness is a source of creativity. This utopian dimension of boredom has tended to be less usual in authors after him—​some of whom developed this concept very productively, as we will see below. Kant also characterizes boredom through inactivity and emptiness. The human tendency to avoid the emptiness of mental contents—​which, he states, causes disgust of one’s existence—​makes the individual strive for sensations, for “one grows weary of inactivity” (1996, p. 38). Kant’s stress is placed on a surplus of free time, indicating that this mental emptiness is especially distressing for cultured people; hence, his indication that the fine arts or social activity

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are the most typical ways to overcome boredom passing the time (1996). Boredom is thus not only an annoying state of mind but also—​in contrast with Goethe—​an unproductive one. After Kant, Fichte and Hegel advanced the understanding of boredom in two senses: first, by emphasizing its social and cultural dimension beyond its consideration as a merely particular theme; second, by indicating boredom dialectically through the possibilities it opens, as in Goethe’s epigram. Thus, Fichte diagnosed, in world-​historical terms, that the absence for the people of a guiding idea—​a vast emptiness—​generates collective boredom to which the only real alternative would be to strive for such a new idea (1962, I/​8). Hegel, on the other hand, argued that boredom stems from the disappointment in the absence of social change—​as a result, for example, of the lack of an anticipated state of things, such as “the awakening of expectations through the unfulfilled promises” of science (1977, p. 8). Indefinite repetition, instead of an awaited change, leads thus to boredom. However, as a collective mental state that we have to surpass through activity in history, boredom is, for Hegel, a condition that promotes the creative expression of the Spirit, thus setting the philosophical foundations for a utopian vindication of this state of mind. Frivolity and boredom are, for Hegel, symptoms of the Spirit in the transition to a new world: they “unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change in history” (1977, pp. 6–​7). Hegel considers boredom both as emptiness and repetition, although the latter tends to prevail in his writings. As far as it does not provide new contents into the movement of the Spirit, Hegel finds abstraction to be boring, as in the cases of the formalism of reason in the Stoics, in the concept of virtue (1977) and emptiness—​absence of contents—​of concepts such as happiness and welfare (2001). Nevertheless, more than by inactivity, boredom is caused by repetition in the absence of new contents and determinations, as in the tautology of the syllogism merely consisting of three judgments, or the mere assertion of identity: Nothing will be held to be more tedious, more aggravating, than a conversation which only chews the cud, however true the cud might nevertheless be. Let us take a closer look at what makes such a truth tedious. So, the beginning, ‘The plant is …,’ makes moves in the direction of saying something, of adducing a further determination. But since only the same is repeated, the opposite has happened instead, nothing has occurred (2010, pp. 359–​360).

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In turn, Fichte referred to boredom from an avant la lettre Weberian work ethics: boredom would be an empty time, devoid of practical activity, where time is “killed” [zeitvertreiben] (1962, I/​8, p. 390), and is hence to be avoided through the best utilization of time, for attaining knowledge (1962, II/​12) or work in general (1962, I/​8). He, therefore, championed the abolition of traditions that produce laziness (1962, II/​9), and even proposed that the State should keep the idle from traveling abroad since they thus spread their boredom across the world (1962, I/​7). 3

Class and Boredom

It is during the conjuncture of the European 1840s when boredom becomes a more concretely political topic in the work of several philosophers. The heavily politicized milieu—​in Hobsbawm’s words, “a curious romantic-​utopian atmosphere” (1977, p. 21)—​reached its highest point in 1848, as the first potentially global revolution for the laboring poor, and, hence, by then, class conflict had become a common theme in public opinion. At that time, Kierkegaard mainly saw the class determinations of boredom. On the one hand, the elite, the “nobility,” get bored because they are not busy: Those who bore others are the plebeians, the mass, the endless train of humanity in general. Those who bore themselves are the elect, the nobility; and how strange it is that those who don’t bore themselves usually bore others, while those who do bore themselves amuse others. The people who do not bore themselves are generally those who are busy in the world in one way or another, but that is just why they are the most boring, the most insufferable, of all (1992, p. 188). However, he also indicates that repetition produces boredom, and chance is hence welcome as an antidote against routine life. Repetition is, precisely, the universal source of boredom for the working class: saying work annuls it [boredom] is to betray confusion, for though idleness, certainly, can be annulled by industry, seeing the latter is its opposite, boredom cannot, as one also sees that the busiest workers of all, those who in their officious buzzing about most resemble humming insects, are the most boring of all; and if they don’t bore themselves, that’s because they have no idea what boredom is; but in that case boredom is not annulled (1992, p. 189).

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Boredom would hence have two roots:  inactivity, in the case of the well-​ off, and repetition, in the case of the working class. Focusing on the first, Schopenhauer—​like Nietzsche after him (2001; 2007)—​1 conceived boredom as a malady of wealthy upper classes (1974), while a young Friedrich Engels related boredom to the physical and mental damage that mechanical repetition does over industrial workers. In contrast to Schopenhauer, Engels did not oppose necessity and boredom—​boredom presupposes the former in capitalism since wage labor is alienated lifetime from the laborer. There, the supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative’s thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus, it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment’s rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines. This condemnation to be buried alive in the mill, to give constant attention to the tireless machine is felt as the keenest torture by the operatives, and its action upon mind and body is in the long run stunting in the highest degree (1987, p. 192). 4

Democratizing Boredom

With Kierkegaard and Engels, we see a significative turn in the concept of boredom that goes beyond the sphere of the leisure time and the privileged classes to the realm of labor and the working class. In this direction, boredom becomes a central topic for German philosophy and cultural criticism with the arrival of the 20th century, when, with the 8-​hours working day, free time was not anymore a privilege of the elites, and mass culture emerged as a new social phenomenon conditioned by the emergence of what Adorno and Horkheimer

1 However, in contrast to Schopenhauer and in the line of Goethe, boredom for Nietzsche entails possibilities for human fulfillment.

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would later call the culture industries (Hobsbawm, 1989). By entering the realm of mass consumption, boredom becomes democratized. Hence, for authors like Simmel, Kracauer, and Heidegger—​who had an essential influence on Marxist philosophical discussions in the 20th century—​ boredom is a condition inherent to modern subjectivity. The former argued that the abstraction of the world through money and the abundance of stimuli to which big cities expose their inhabitants lead them to a blasé attitude:  a blunting of discrimination where no object deserves preference over any other (1997). Kracauer also thought about boredom as a result of overexposure to mass media—​to the radio, especially—​and to heavily concurred places. He conceives two kinds of boredom: purely casual one, produced by the repetition of monotonous actions (what we have called repetition-​boredom), and another—​the real boredom (our emptiness-​boredom)—​that comes from leisure time. The latter, however, allows one to assume control over one’s existence, gives place to new projects, and calls for reflection: this kind of boredom makes the human being present (2005). In the same line, Heidegger distinguishes three kinds of boredom, out of which boredom without content—​profound boredom, similar to Kracauer’s real boredom—​would be the fundamental attunement [Grundstimmung] of contemporary subjectivity (1995). Everyday activity and the struggle against necessity only partially conceal “the fundamental emptiness that bores us” (1995, p. 164), and, indeed, it is the acknowledgment of the latter that allows the subject [Dasein] to become aware of their temporal condition. By so doing, we could eventually .

help bring to word that which Dasein wishes to speak about in this fundamental attunement—​bring it to that which is not simply a matter of gossip, but the word that addresses us and summons us to action and being (1995, p. 167). Profound boredom would thus be a way out of the inauthenticity of the contemporary Dasein, characterized by anonymity and gossip—​mass culture, in short. The importance of boredom for Marxist authors grew during the Weimar Republic, during the same period when Kracauer and Heidegger were writing about this topic. This emergence is part of the turn in Marxism from political economy to philosophical and cultural themes, which, according to Perry Anderson (1979), characterizes Western Marxism. Until then, the fundamental anthropological problem in the Second International Marxism was ­exploitation.

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Although, as we have previously indicated, Engels did consider boredom an essential problem for the working class, Marx did not develop his criticism of the alienating consequences of industrial labor in that direction—​in his more anthropologically-​centered Manuscripts of Economy and Philosophy, he only addresses boredom in a Hegelian way, as a longing felt by the philosopher for a content (1975). Paul Lafargue’s many arguments against labor and productivism do not include criticism of boredom either; at most, he states that in socialist society—​a “regime of laziness”—​art would help to “kill time” (1907, p. 46). Even Lukács, a disciple of Simmel in his early intellectual life, did not observe the relations between abstraction and boredom when writing his criticism of reification in History and Class Consciousness (1971). Engels’ concept of boredom reappears in young Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (2000), published in 1918. This book, influenced not only by Simmel but also by Expressionism, sought to read Marx from his utopian possibilities and not only from his criticism of the economic determinations of capitalism, arguing that certainly we will no longer work out of necessity, indeed we will work much better and more productively, our boredom and wretchedness is a sufficient guarantee of that, and there—​as is already true for the teacher, official, politician, artist and scientist—​pleasure in one’s ability will replace the profit motive as a sufficient motivation, at least for practical occupations (2000, p. 245). In this position, the overcoming of boredom is dependent on human fulfillment through labor: Bloch insists on this by pointing out that the goal, the eminently practical goal, the basic motif of socialist ideology [is]: to bestow on every human being time outside of work, his own need, boredom, wretchedness, privation and gloom, his own submerged light calling, a life in the Dostoevskyan sense, so that he will have set things right with himself, with his moral party membership, when the walls of the body fall, the world-​body that protected us from the demons: when in other words the fortifications of the mundanely ordered kingdom are demolished. And now a distant fluttering also goes before us, the soul grows bright, the truly creative idea awakens (2000, p. 268). Bloch, thus, follows the concept of boredom as repetition and conceives it as an obstacle to be overcome to reach personal satisfaction. Most Marxist authors after him coincide with his concept but expand it into the realm of free time and everyday life. The growing commodification of free time with the

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development of mass media was part of the process of capital expanding its influence on other realms of life beyond the factory and the market, and, since the 1940s, these authors think about boredom as a generalized problem in capitalism, and not exclusive of the working class. 5

Boredom and the Culture Industry

The post-​War Marxist critique of boredom corresponds with the conjuncture of the so-​called Trente Glorieuses, the approximately 30  years of economic growth of capitalism under a Fordist-​Keynesian model (Hobsbawm, 1994). Nonetheless, by considering the ideology of consumerism and spectacle as the counterpart of exploitation, Western European Marxist authors argued that this economic prosperity led to highly industrialized countries to a qualitative pauperization of the everyday lives of working-​class people. In this sense, Adorno conceived boredom as a result of free time, as a form of alienation. With Horkheimer, he described this mental state as the counterpart of entertainment: within the culture industry—​a social dynamic where free time is a prolongation of labor time—​amusement congeals into boredom (2002). A couple of decades later, Adorno argued that the social function of entertainment is to obfuscate this systematically produced boredom, instead of helping to solve the conditions that produce it—​and thus to oppose the emancipatory functions of art (1997). His stance on (repetition-​) boredom as a social phenomenon indicates that: Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labour. It need not be so. Whenever behaviour in spare time is truly autonomous, determined by free people for themselves, boredom rarely figures […] If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of the ever same, they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflection of objective dullness. As such it is in a similar position to political apathy (2001, p. 192). In the early 1960s, Henri Lefebvre also conceived boredom as a form of alienation in modern societies, calling for the need for a ‘sociology of boredom’ as part of the critique of everyday life (1991). And, while in the early 1980s he still considered boredom an essential problem of capitalist societies (2008), in his 1959 preface to the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, he already criticized official Marxism for having become boring: thus, “it has been a

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disappointment; young people are disappointed with it because it bores them” (1991, pp. 84–​85). Indeed, in this line of a new left politics, one of the most famous slogans from the Parisian uprisings of 1968, ‘Boredom is counterrevolutionary,’ bears the mark of Lefebvre as one of its inspiring philosophers. Against boredom and other forms of alienation in both capitalism and historical socialism, Lefebvre proposed his theory of moments—​a concept adopted under the name of situations by the Situationist movement, thus highlighting their spatial character—​as activities that have an end in themselves—​love, play, and art. In a properly socialist liberated society, moments would prevail over compulsory activities, as would freedom over necessity: this would lead to a society without boredom. By the same time, Agnes Heller—​the influential Hungarian Marxist theorist of everyday life in the 1970s—​conceived boredom as an affective phenomenon caused by an excess of time. Nonetheless, not just any kind of activity would solve the problem of boredom: The antithesis of boredom is not activity in general, not even mandatory activity, but purposeful, reasoned activity which allows man’s capabilities to expand and develop. The more generally such activity is available to the members of a society, and the more it is made use of (and here both objective and subjective factors are of equal importance, though the former is socially fundamental), the less will the members of that society suffer from boredom (1984, p. 243). Perhaps, Erich Fromm is the most pessimist author within the Marxist tradition concerning the concept of boredom. He conceives it in a necessary relation to depression and aggressiveness but finds that, in industrial societies, boredom is normalized and not considered a pathological condition. Thus, This chronic—​profound—​boredom is concealed by diverse stimuli and remains unconscious most of the time; nonetheless, working-​class people are more aware of their boredom due to the unchallenging nature of their labor. Furthermore, drawing from psychoanalysis, Fromm characterizes chronic boredom as one of the premises of malignant aggression and explains it as the result of a socially-​produced sick character, which the experience of repetitive stimuli relieves only temporarily: repetition is hence caused by boredom and not inversely, as most other Marxist authors maintained. Moreover, this boredom, closely related to the death drive, cannot lead to a creative sublation. The symptoms of chronic

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boredom range from the consumption of violent literature and spectacles to openly cruel behavior against other persons (1973, p. 247). 6

A Reassertion of Boredom for the 21st Century?

However, if we were to look for a utopian use of boredom in contemporary societies, it could be especially fruitful to discuss two authors in the tradition of critical theory: Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson. In contrast with the thesis of boredom as alienation, the former explored this mental state by focusing on its dialectical possibilities and utopian side. In this vein, his 1936 essay about Leskov observes that if sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—​ the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—​are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this, the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears (2007, p. 91). Jameson has similarly asserted the role of boredom as an aesthetic response and phenomenological problem in postmodern culture: Boredom then becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as a defense mechanism or avoidance behavior. Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people’s cultural practices and their threat to our own rationalizations about the nature and value of art. Meanwhile, it is no great secret that in some of the most significant works of high modernism, what is boring can often be very interesting indeed, and vice versa […]. We must therefore initially try to strip the concept of the boring (and its experience) of any axiological overtones and bracket the whole question of aesthetic value. It is a paradox one can get used to: if a boring text can also be good (or interesting, as we now put it), exciting texts, which incorporate diversion, distraction, temporal commodification, can also perhaps sometimes be “bad” (or “degraded,” to use Frankfurt School language) (1997, pp. 71-​72).

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Consistent with this position, Jameson has also warned against the antiutopian uses of the concept of boredom. By analyzing several recent trends in science-​fiction literature, he finds three main lines of such pro-​capitalist argumentations that use boredom against socialist utopias: the thesis that the latter lead to boredom—​and are hence not an appropriate content for a work of art—​; that a utopian society would be boring because it eliminates risk and meaningful projects for the future; and that an egalitarian society would produce boring subjects by depersonalizing them. These positions show how we can use the alleged boredom in a socialist society as propaganda for the capitalist establishment (Jameson, 2007). In this manner, the critique of boredom tends to serve a status quo where, as Žižek affirms, the new social (super-​egotical) imperative of the postmodern subject is to enjoy themselves and even to feel guilty for not enjoying sufficiently (1994). There is a sort of anxiety towards temporal emptiness, which is relieved in Western 21st-​century countries through sensorial saturation as a result of mass media and the Internet. Far more pervading than the stimuli in metropolitan life, observed by early 20th-​century philosophers, this commodification of everyday life even threatens sleep—​the Benjaminian ‘apogee of physical relaxation’—​through its ideal of a 24/​7 shadowless world of machinic performance (Crary, 2014). This fact forms part of the process of acceleration of social and subjective times—​conceptualized as a process of time-​space compression by David Harvey (1999)—​that is produced by capital’s need to accelerate its turnover times to maximize its accumulation. However, time is one of the fundamental elements for the human appropriation of their immediate world, and its reduction to the abstract principles of economic profit only leads to frustration and, eventually, to aggression to others and oneself. Alienated labor and entertainment serve the compulsion for the subject to ‘kill time’ or ‘make time short,’ but, eventually, lead to repetition-​boredom. In contrast, the experience of a long time, despite not being pleasant, opens the possibility of a conscious appropriation of the emptiness-​bored person’s own time. In other words, repetition-​boredom, by focusing on the contents that bore the subject, evades the problem of profound boredom—​emptiness-​ boredom—​which could lead them to step out of the social inertia. In this sense, besides Schopenhauer and Fromm, who find no further creative possibilities in emptiness-​boredom, there is a dialectic of boredom that has been ignored by most of the authors above presented—​many of whom, otherwise, have done dialectical explanations themselves. It is by conceiving this kind of boredom as a possibility that we can best seize its utopian side.

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Boredom, for Benjamin and Jameson, is hence not the same as the one criticized by Adorno or Lefebvre:  it is a Goethean emptiness-​boredom that breaks away from the alienating repetition-​boredom through the aesthetic experience. Although experienced as a nuisance, boredom can be productive in terms of social and personal growth by making it possible for the subject to become aware of the social conditions that pauperize their everyday experience. In this sense, the historical character of modern boredom is indicative of the path for the critique of modernity from the perspective of the everyday experience. Lefebvre’s proposal of moments as ends in themselves—​or as singular experiences that break away from capitalist abstraction as the sole guiding social principle—​is thus a step in the direction of understanding the systemic production of an unsatisfying everyday life. Emptiness-​boredom can then eventually be a condition for the conscious action for the transformation of the boring—​repetitive and seemingly meaningless—​modern social world by taking us out of everyday inertia. 7

Conclusions

Our overview has described how the social transformations in the last two centuries have conditioned the specific contents of the concept of boredom in German philosophy and European Marxist critical theory. From the time of Romanticism and German Idealism—​when boredom became an essential topic for European modernity—​emerged two fundamental types of boredom: an emptiness-​boredom and a repetition-​boredom not explicitly ascribed to specific social groups. The former refers to an excess of free time, while the latter to mental or physical activity of a more mechanical kind. Since the conjuncture of the 1840s, we find emptiness-​boredom explicitly linked to economic and intellectual elites, and repetition-​boredom to the working class and, more broadly, to the masses. With the arrival of the 20th century, several German philosophers and cultural critics explained boredom concerning the new conditions of the monetary economy, urban life, and mass media, and criticized the alienating character of repetition-​boredom. Kracauer and Heidegger, however, argued that emptiness-​boredom could lead the subject to productive humanly fulfilling activity. Marxist authors after World War ii, especially paid attention to the alienation of everyday life through the commodification of free time. Economic growth, they argued, did not lead to better lives for persons living in capitalism, and boredom was a symptom of this deeply unsatisfying social order. Finally, against this concept of boredom, we have endorsed Jameson’s dialectical

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concept, which, in the line of Benjamin, presents boredom as a gateway to a human appropriation of time. Thus, in times of acceleration of social and subjective temporalities, driven by the necessity of maximizing capital accumulation, emptiness-​boredom can thus serve as a step in the direction of emancipation through reflection, creation, and awareness of the conditions that underpin unhappiness in modern everyday life.2

Bibliography

Adorno, T. (1997). Aesthetic Theory. London/​New York: Continuum. Adorno, T. (2001). Free time. In: The Culture Industry; Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 187–​197. Adorno, T., and Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, P. (1979). Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (2007). Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken. Bloch, E. (2000). Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Crary, J. (2014). 24/​7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London/​New York: Verso. Engels, F. (1987). The Condition of the Working Class in England. London/​New  York: ­Penguin. Fichte, J.G. (1962). Gesamtausgabe [Complete Works]. Stuttgart/​ Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-​Holzboog. Fromm, E. (1973). Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New  York/​Chicago/​San ­Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Goethe, J.W.v. (2018). Epigram 27. Wikiquote. Accessed 09/​10/​2018. https://​en.wikiquote.org/​wiki/​Johann_​Wolfgang_​von_​Goethe. Harvey, D. (1999). The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry on the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden/​Oxford: Blackwell. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford/​New  York:  Oxford University Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (2001). Philosophy of Right. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Hegel, G.W.F. (2010). Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Bloomington/​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2 I am indebted to some of the observations from the Historisch-​kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus collective to the first non-​published version of this essay, especially those regarding German Idealism.

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Heller, A. (1984). Everyday Life. London/​Boston/​Melbourne/​Henley: Routledge/​Kegan Paul. Hobsbawm, E. (1977). Age of Capital, 1848–​1875. London: Abacus. Hobsbawm, E. (1989). Age of Empire, 1875–​1914. New York: Vintage. Hobsbawm, E. (1994). Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–​1991. London: Abacus. Hobsbawm, E. (1996). Age of Revolution, 1789–​1848. New York: Vintage. Jameson, F. (1997). Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (2007). Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London/​New York: Verso. Kant, I. (1996). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Either/​Or. A Fragment of Life. London/​New York: Penguin. Kracauer, S. (2005). Boredom. In: The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 331–​334. Lafargue, P. (1907). The Right to Be Lazy, and Other Studies. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. Lefebvre, H. (1991). Critique of Everyday Life. Volume 1: Introduction. London/​New York: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (2008). Critique of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London/​New York: Verso. Lukács, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: The mit Press. Marx, K. (1975). Collected Works, Volume 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (1993). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). London: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science. Cambridge/​New  York:  Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2007). Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits. London: Read Books. Osborne, P. (2008). The Dreambird of Experience. Utopia, Possibility, Boredom. Radical Philosophy 137 (May-​June), pp. 36–​44. Schopenhauer, A. (1974). Parerga and Paralipomena. Short Philosophical Essays, Volume 1. Oxford/​New York: Oxford University Press. Simmel, G. (1997). The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: D. Frisby, and M. Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture. London: Sage. Svendsen, L. (2005). A Philosophy of Boredom, London: Reaktion Books. Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Penguin. Williams, R. (1960). Culture and Society, 1780–​1950. New York: Anchor Books. Žižek, S. (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment. Six Essays on Woman and Causality. ­London/​New York: Verso.

­c hapter 4

About Boredom: Hermeneutic Looks and Existential Analysis in Modernity Juan Diego Hernández Albarracín and Carlos Fernando Álvarez González Abstract This chapter presents a philosophical view to the concept of boredom [Langeweile] from its forms (bored for …, bored in …, one gets bored) and structural modes (leaving voids and postponing), worked by Martin Heidegger in his classes at the University of Freiburg during the winter semesters of 1929 and 1930. It is intended to rescue a marginal philosophical stance to the traditional positions of Heideggerian thought, being able, in the proposed hermeneutic-​phenomenological transit, to interweave their philosophical images with cinematographic narratives that enrich the real understanding of the modernity. We assume boredom and its essence, Langweiligkeit, as the fundamental mood [Grundstimmung] of our era, allowing other mobility of thought to study the phenomena of cultural entertainment as a symptom of the modern disease by distancing the Dasein of the meeting, interrogation, and self-​care.

Keywords boredom –​ Dasein –​ Modernity –​ mood –​ self-​care

1

Introduction

This philosophical study interprets the three fundamental forms of boredom identified by Heidegger as essential moods of our historical existence [Grundstimmung], through the integration of emotional disposition [Befinlichkeit], developed in Being and Time, for the inspection of the existence [Dasein], from the analysis of fear and anguish, thus enunciating a particular openness manifested “in the fact that Dasein’s fleeing is a fleeing in the face of itself”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_006

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(1962, p. 229),1—​which needs to “proceed towards the Being of the totality of the structure whole”(1962, p. 229). Therefore, it is necessary to analyze it carefully because it demands a historical elucidation of moods that take out the being-​there from its special inner relationship, and relates to an animosity that surpasses it by questioning its temporary topicality (Lythgoe, 2014). The analysis of the boredom image is critical to think about its potential condition as a mood; thus, allowing the Dasein to make “the elementary experience that, as an existing openness to the world, is not something different from a being-​in-​possibilities: its way of being is the to-​be-​able-​to-​be (Seinkonnen), and to project (Sich-​Entwerfen)” (Held, 1991, p. 32); i.e., we live in the world in a defined way every time through sadness, joy, and, of course, boredom, setting or affecting ostensibly both the world itself and that surrounding us. Consequently, this phenomenological look at boredom dismisses the scientific theses that stipulate the mood as an event originated in the subject by a specific cause, which should be analyzed psychologically to determine and measure the factors that force its appearance. This compelling desire in the sciences requires naming and calculating, according to the norms of its specialty, some specific purpose in the clinical analysis, or the causal inspection of formal reason. Therefore, it is about sharpening the mood condition, exacerbating it until its deepening, releasing itself from causal logics, that pervade the scientific studies of the affections as mere stains or occasional companions of the existence that consider mood as “mere emotional event or a state, in the way that a metal is liquid or solid” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 65). The aim is to point it as a fundamental state in which the vision, observation, and understanding of the world are determined, as Wittgenstein establishes (1922, p. 88), in his Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, as a relationship that distinguishes “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man,” assuming that the mundane construction depends on the mood, not on a normalized historical situation—​which would serve more to a subjective vision of the world than to an existential posture. Heidegger observed that the mood warns not only the one who possesses it consciously, but to all the people they interact with because they “belong to the being of man” (1995, p. 65). That means that the occurrence of the world is conditioned according to the mood temperance, linking this structure with a determined being-​in-​the-​world, not attending to deterministic requirements, but concentrating on the kinetics of the emotions that make, untimely, the relations. 1 All quotes our translation and editor’s translation when no English edition was available.

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According to those strategic relationships that arise from the mood relationship, imagine being in a cafeteria near the university where we study or work; we are celebrating that the mid-​term exams have finished and, so far, everything is perfect. We talk about what has happened: memories, funny situations, confidences, everything to make the conversation more enjoyable. Immediately, a friend arrives; there have been rumors that he has broken up with his girlfriend (of course, not all the people in the place know it). The young man sits and, after a few minutes, the happy atmosphere becomes murky; the laughter—​which, in the first instance, dominated—​is set aside to give way to stern faces and inquisitive looks that make the climate tense. Silence becomes evident, and no one says anything, and the discomfort disturbs. We witnessed the emergence of a mood, a new temperament, which, given its intensity, spread throughout the atmosphere because of the situation. It does not mean that his state of mind was influential to others, but his temperance was since we have already pointed out that mood inhabits every one, and is regulated socially, establishing the primary being-​there relationships [Dasein] and the being-​one-​with-​another, precisely because (Heidegger, 1995, p. 67): It seems as though an attunement is in each case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves, and that then attunes us through and through. It does not merely seem so, it is so; and, faced with this fact, we must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences, and consciousness. It is a matter of seeing and saying what is happening here. The temper of the disgruntled individual affected without being a verifiable fact because “precisely the fact that we are subject to moods indicates that they are not mere inner states that are projected onto a meaningless world” (Svendsen, 2005, p. 110). Although it is necessary to find the mood temper that reaches the very root of existence, this does not imply a state of oneness but of existential diversity to understand the relationships the Dasein has with the world. Thus, the participants are tempered in their way, confirming that we are not in a constant emptying of the individual capacity—​ waiting to be filled with some new experience or emotion. Moods are in the very interior of the existence because thought is mediated (Escudero, 2007, p. 368): By a fundamental state of mind that happens in an epochal way, i.e., that pervades the way of thinking of an ancient time […]. Moods always precede and open up through, so these are never at your disposal […].

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Indeed, the event of being is manifested from different moods such as fright, contention, joy, astonishment, anguish, worry, ecstasy, or boredom. 2

Brief Historic-​Conceptual Explanation of Boredom

Conceiving boredom as a philosophical theme seems foolish because what mostly bores (boredom) is outlined as a marginal element, according to the few existing treaties and the agonizing intrusions of some thinkers to work boredom in their systems—​“stigmatized from Plato and discussed by Descartes by its inability to bring true knowledge, we see that feelings such as love, hatred, envy, joy, boredom or anguish have no place in the great philosophical treatises” (Escudero, 2014, pp. 34–​35). This constant on the reflective inoperability can also be due to the impetuosity of the modern entertainments, which are affirmed as escapes to boredom, making it the greatest banish of contemporary thought, which has resonance in the clinical world of psychology to eradicate it. We relate a series of true propositions that describe the correspondence of this phenomenon with the preceding eras and their influence on the comprehension in different scenarios of the current Western culture. Boredom has been an outcast of philosophical activity. In the Middle Ages, as acedia, it was conceived among the worst sins (Safranski, 2015) to be resisted “through stamina and patience […] and what follows is joy” (Svendsen, 2005, p.  50), as Evagrius Ponticus says about this encounter with God that must establish a dynamism that frees of laziness, boredom, and harmful practices from leisure—​hence establishing the need for entertainment activities, which indicated a relationship of work that “ceases to be the means of making a living in order to become the essence of man and his transformed nature” (Peretó Rivas, 2011, p. 337). Most of the philosophical postures that discredited boredom as a source of knowledge, by relegating it to an exercise of vice and negative passions, corresponded to theocratic regimes that considered the dull subject far from divine rejoicing, falling into an overwhelming emptiness that lacks of meaning and is pure vanity: “man without God is in total ignorance and inevitable misery [boredom]” (Pascal, 1901, p. 103). The arguments on tedium differ historically from one to another, from an explicitly theocentric position, in the Middle Ages, to a strictly medical or physiological condition, in the Renaissance, being understood as melancholy from the studies of Robert Burton, in his extensive treatises titled Anatomy of Melancholy (1947)—​which, in several volumes, collected significant data, ranging from classical Greece to the mid-​14th century,

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in a physiological look to the analytical horizon of passions that had not reach enough interest yet due to the depths of the existential territory. We find the demarcations of practical reason in the mental and social behavior of the time—​as happens in the most functional vision of the 18th century—​with notably interest, because it is the starting point of modern social conceptions through normative fulfillment, the practices of freedom in the individuals of the illustrated proto-​liberalism of the 19th century—​developer of a metaphysical structure that teach, according to Kant, that the duty coercion and the empty coercion by obligation would be the real freedom (Svendsen, 2005). On the normative propensity of modern metaphysics, and its struggle against the manifestation of boredom through the implementation of duty and industriousness, we can see, in Contra Natura [Against Nature] (2018), by Joris Huysmans, the emptiness that produces the unproductivity and the attachment to the superficial, to the excessive leisure, that only causes dejection, and needs to be cured through the occupation—​as an updated condition of Evagrius Ponticus ideas that migrate from the Middle Ages to the modern world, and that Vila-​Matas would say in relation to Contra Natura: “the word has become so rarefied that no one knows the way back to life” (2010). This rarefied place, referred by the Argentinean writer, has to do with the profound decadence of the entertaining and superficial world that tries to unleash that Gordian knot through the project of the normed productivism of the new times—​whose main foundation lies in the infallibility of the reason—​so that the factual occupation becomes determinant to rid the Dasein of the agonies, anguish, and boredom—​result of a leisure that damages the existential subject because it assumes “that tedium is a disease of the idle, or that it attacks only those who have nothing to do” (Svendsen, 2005, p. 34). From this point of view, it is true the thesis of Kierkegaard, found in the works about tedium carried out by Svendsen, about boredom as reason of all evil, understanding that, historically and ontologically, boredom has not been fully reflected but only as a result of some “unpleasant emotional disorder, in which the subject feels tiredness, annoyance or tedium” (López Aguilar and Sánchez Dorantes, 2010, p. 2). Therefore, the implicit horizon of Heidegger’s philosophical work sees in boredom a fundamental mood temperance that returns the subject to a relationship of care about himself: this is the spectacle of public speaking, and the rales of the modern entertainer world, which is tedious “when everything is transparent. That is why some people hanker for what is dangerous and shocking. They have replaced the non-​transparent by the extreme” (Svendsen, 2005, p. 38), or, as Jünger recalls, in his diary on the World War i, “these short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our

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mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There’s nothing worse for a soldier than boredom” (2004, p. 88–​89). Thus, it enunciates an image of boredom different from that of acedia, located in the death of God, “meaning that the suprasensitive world lacks operant force” (García Aguilar, 2006, p. 214), appealing to the reproduction of the idols of the modern life. For this reason, we see that war, the entertainment of cultural industries, or violence, produced as relevant news, integrate a whole matrix of understanding that keeps us out but always in motion, being able, in this explanatory transit, to attract works like those of Brierre de Boismont in 1850, sociological works like that of Émile Durkheim in 1896, and, of course, many literary approximations in which tedium is “considered as an aesthetic state, not only of characters but especially of the author” (Lesmes, 2009, p. 168), assuring at least a modern concern for a passion to be determined to understand le Nouveau Siècle. Today, the location of boredom as the primary reference of the modern world would be little more than foolishness due to the advertising insistence [die Offentlichkeit] of locating the Dasein in the occupation state of the they-​ self speeches [das Man] that subordinate it “to Others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 164). Because of this, the fundamental mood would enter the field of existential action to undo the link from that public speaking that “gets obscured, and what thus has been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone” (Heidegger, 1962, p.  165), by granting the possibility of a phenomenological look at the need and responsibility of questioning ourselves, i.e., of caring and concerning about oneself—​which tears up the veil of co-​opted occupation and awakens “the main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,” as Foucault (1988, p. 9) would affirm in the interview with Rux Martin. Consequently, this boredom has to do with us from a problematic and original relationship with ourselves, not because boredom always stays asleep and never shows up, but because it fluctuates because of the multiple contacts of the Dasein with the daily experience. Thus, such awakening implies also staying, a being made in the vigil so that it can unleash its potential. This does not imply a simply bring to consciousness and its verification, but letting it be as such so that it manifests without distraction or publicity gossip that inhibit its fundamental development, establishing, by this, that “understanding of attunement ultimately demands of us a transformation in our fundamental conception of man” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 82). Such a demand implies a revision to the history of the metaphysics tradition “as the name for the center and core that determines all philosophy” (Heidegger, 2014a, p. 19), through which the modern image of the man—​as a subject

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trapped in the understandings coming exclusively from his rationality—​was consolidated as a subject whose ability would be to engender, control, and manipulate the outcome of his relationship with the facticity from a thought understood “so far that the practical, technical explanation of science confesses itself at the same time to be science as cultural value, so that both understand each other very well in the same dearth of spirit” (Heidegger, 2014a, p. 53). On this basis, Heidegger appeals to a review of the history of metaphysics not as a philosophical discipline but as the essence of all philosophy, leaving aside “the theory of knowledge and facing the phenomenon from a philosophical proposal that links the extreme question to the aporia of existence” (Hernández Albarracín, 2016, p. 66). The awakening and remaining of the mood corresponds to a refocus on the absolute postures that have ruled the history of philosophy (metaphysics) so far, thus adopting “the problems of the foundations of Western philosophy […], characterized by having incurred in the forgetfulness: the forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit)” (Cavallé Cruz, 2001, p. 184), and propitiating a turn [die Kehre] where the norm and the technical reason prevail from the calculation—​posture whose territorial proximity is poetic because “only where there is language does world prevail […], language is not something that the human being has among other faculties and tools. Rather, language is that which has the human being” (Heidegger, 2014b, p. 61). Boredom, seen from Heidegger, cannot be understood if one does not have a close union with an image of the world inhabited by the original condition of the language detached from the poetic saying—​not understood as a pure artistic discipline but in its empowered establishment and adequate foundation of what remains. The poet is the one who bases the being (Heidegger, 2014b). Mood manifestation is a historical-​existential resonance that remains close to those held by boredom and do not see or feel their boredom. This time shows what is true: the manifestation of the being (Heidegger, 2014b) makes it possible to take the path that opens a contemporary image of the relations between the Dasein, the language, and the habitation of the world. 3

Boredom by. Hermeneutical Perspectives

The three structural types of boredom are presented and are opened distinctively from the depth of our existence to build an authentic questioning. Therefore, the aim is not to find what bores us but its essence, since the core is not boredom—​“what is boring, after all, must precisely be at hand in order

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to bore us” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 102). Its essence is indispensable to be able to define and interpret questions to comprehend the phenomenon. Once related the essence of boredom as boring—​condition that detaches the bond with that which bores—​meaning that “a thing, a book, a play, a ceremony, yet also a person, a group of people, indeed even an environment or a place—​such boring things are not boredom itself” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 82), it is necessary to inquire on the ways in which boredom manifests. We will begin with the first form recognized by Heidegger as ‘boredom by …’: the more superficial because it is also the most daily and recognizable of the three forms. It arises from the disappointment that produces the time when it raises from the inhibition of a planned event that extends an unnecessary wait. We provide a cinematographic example so that the explanation transcends the barriers of writing. In the initial scene of the film My Private Idaho, by Gus Vant Sant, we see a boy who is with his suitcase contemplating a desolate path. No cars have passed on the track; however, the boy is waiting. He saunters sideways while looking at the road; he pulls his watch off and on again to look at the time and its course. He stops to see a rabbit that comes out through the weeds of the terrain and keeps looking, waiting for an event that allows him to continue his walk. The image needs to leave the place where the subject is, leading to uneasy and walk from side to side as looking for a distraction, something that takes him out of the eternal routine without event. Looking at the clock indicates that he is waiting for a specific time when seems to be able to leave, and he needs to occupy the moment so that time moves a little faster and frees him from the expectant tension of the extended and overwhelming pause, with the implementation of a direct exercise called pastime [Zeitvertreib] as “to master boredom by busily passing the time” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 160) or the passivity of doing something with the downtime. Precisely, the relationship with time reveals boredom to the extent that, as seen in the example, the clock is recursively watched, proving that softening the weight of time is a failure, making it essential to warn that looking at our watch already indicates, by its helpless gesture, our failure to pass the time, and thus indicates that we are becoming increasingly bored. That is why we look repeatedly at our watch—​yet this is not some purely mechanical action (Heidegger, 1995, p. 97). Boredom is not the product of an external stimulus but a constitutive phenomenon of Dasein and reflects temporal and spatial actions to avoid its

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symptomatic imperative. Thus, Heidegger recognizes two structural moments of this form: “firstly being held in limbo by time as it drags along, and then this coming to be left empty by things and in general by the individual beings surrounding us in this specific boring situation” (1995, p. 106). They support the next nomination of each of the forms of boredom, postponing [Hingehaltenheit] and leaving voids [Leergelassenheit], as decisive moments to understand the awakening of the imperative mood. Consequently, the ‘postponing’ of boredom by presents an affliction towards the defaulting course of the time; temporality oppresses us in an extended walk that prevents us from walking towards our destiny. Therefore, it must appeal to the pastime, which “means an occupation that diverts our attention away from time as it drags and from its oppressing us” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 99), so that the gait is hurried and freed the Dasein from the agony that produces to be waiting. We can observe the example does not adhere to a reflection on time but to an urgency to accelerate its passage while the Dasein is immersed in distraction. The second structural moment of this boredom (by) is characterized spatially as ‘leaving voids’ by offering absolutely nothing about the entity that surrounds us. This does not mean that the same thing disappears, but it generates a differential poverty, a lack that enriches “a peculiar way of opening the world in its potential” (Candiloro, 2012, p. 274), because a characteristic of the Dasein is to be in the world in the midst of the entity—​claimed by the Heideggerian philosophy “as the necessary starting point of the philosophy: the experience of the world-​environment (Umwelterlebnis), replaced later by the factual experience formula of living (Faktische Lebenserfahrung), later called factual living (Faktisches Leben) and finally ‘being-​there’ ” (Martínez, 2005, p. 91). The poverty of a specific occupation generates “a type of finding by which the man remains in an exceptional belonging as if he had nothing” (Candiloro, 2012, p. 274). This same ‘leaving voids,’ corresponding to the space-​temporal juncture, is expressed in the disposition of the pastime, like a volatile condition of boredom, because the activity we are directed to is determined by nothing specific, i.e., the world does not provide explicit or profitable work but only an activity “to be occupied in any way. Why? Merely so as not to fall into this being left empty that is emerging in boredom” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 101). On this type of occupation, we recall the short film of Tarkovsky The Assassins—​ cinematographic work of 1951, inspired by a story of Ernest Hemingway—​which perfectly shows the state of ‘leaving void’ product of the failure of the pastime. The scene occurs in a bar somewhere unspecified. The owner cleans a jug of beer while his black cooker prepares the menu of the day, and a local young man, sitting at the bar, with whom he establishes

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conversation while leaving the jar clean on the shelf. Suddenly, two unfriendly-​ looking subjects arrive, sit defiantly, and ask for the menu of the day. One of them watches the people of the bar while the other interrogates the owner. Without hesitation, they draw their weapons and threaten the attendants; at this point, they ask for a guy who always dines at the same place at 6 p.m. The owner of the bar says he knows him and attests to the subject’s concurrent time. It is 15 minutes to 6, and there is nothing but silence in the bar and the ticking of the wall clock that covers the whole place. One of the subjects takes some peas from a bottle and begins to spill them on the bar. Immediately, puts them in line and hits them with their finger, waving them all over the place. When he finishes, he does the same thing with everything he finds on the table, all without stopping looking at the wall clock. The moment becomes tense and desperate with the tic-​tac that does not show 6 p.m., the time when they have to meet their victim. At 6 p.m., and after the agony of the time which does not finish in the event needed, they realize that the person they are waiting for will not appear, and they leave the place with the warning to return. It is, therefore, evident to see that things have their own and specific time, clarifying the first thesis of boredom—​it is not the freeway or the bar that bores, but only the moment when the entity does not attend to its precise time, since “boredom is only possible at all because each thing, as we say, has its time. If each thing did not have its time, then there would be no boredom” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 105); it is this moment that precisely determines the boredom by. This is represented as our own and fulfills a crucial function at the time that consents to counteract by any hobby, which, as seen, can be to throw peas or scamper a rabbit: anything that will make the oppressive feeling of the defaulting time that avoids the expected event. 4

Boredom in or the Inhabiting Silence of Boredom [Langweiligkeit]

The second form of boring has problems that hinder a direct and forceful look to the order of distribution and identification of the world, as essential element of boredom by …, which makes it necessary to understand that each description is an interference in the interest of “learning and understanding how to move in the depths of Dasein” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 131)—​which implies, at the same time, taking a philosophical look not like “some arbitrary enterprise with which we pass our time […] [but] an ultimate pronouncement and interlocution on the part of man” (1995, p. 4, 5); a matter which seeks to eliminate the concrete pretension of the Dasein with the entity to confront an even deeper reality that arises from the scrutiny.

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Boredom in shows a being involved in the entity in development, and not an externality that leads the perspective on the phenomenon that predominates as visibly unmistakable and forceful. In the first form, it is known what bores, while, in the second, the provoked is indeterminate. “Accordingly, in the second instance it is not that there is nothing boring at all, rather what is boring us has this character of ‘I know not what’ ” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 114). It is essential to resort to the recognition of the pastime from the analysis of the two main structures of the forms of boredom: 1) postponing, and 2) leaving voids. Because of this, we will use the film Los Muertos [Dublineses]—​directed by John Huston in 1987, and inspired by the story of James Joyce—​set in Dublin, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the narrative context of a New Year’s celebration in the abode of two respectable ladies. The party is organized conventionally: there is good food, hot punch to banish the cold, and liquor to inflame the tongue in conversation. Of course, the music is a factor that cannot miss, and the ladies, due to their refined taste in this matter, entertain the guest with refined chords of the piano, and affable notes of a Bellini opera sung by one of the hostesses. During the main meal—​served with abundant turkey, vegetables, and pudding—​one speaks about everything: from the freshness of the ‘unequaled’ voice of Caruso, which ignited the passions of the present, to the old shudders, passing by the disappearance of the old Parkinson’s singer, to the oldest memory about some deceased family member … everything is perfect. After dinner, the gentlemen smoke cigars, women praise their dresses, and talk about their summer vacations. At the end of the evening, the attendants say goodbye to the hostesses and go home. It seems that everything has been formidable. However, one of the hostess’ nephews stops the passage to look at the Dublin night landscape and realizes that what he has lived that night, in perfect appearance, was not so charming, and that there was something, like a fog that involved them, leaving them empty: a restlessness hardly described with words. It seems, unlikely, that, on the described occasion, a condition such as boredom may arise because the freshness of the attendants marked the situations without finding in the narrative a disposition entirely given to the hobby. It is essential to understand that boredom in manifests to give us the time that liberates the ordinary doing because “we are waiting impatiently for when it is time to leave. We do not look—​not even furtively—​at the clock, we do not think of doing so at all, and yet we are bored with the evening” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 115). We have accepted the invitation because we give ourselves time, and we do not look for anything other than being in a place and in a time that was necessary to spend: “In accepting the invitation […] we have given ourselves time; we have time for it and leave ourselves time for it” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 115). This

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phenomenon that originates when participating is a product of the search-​ nothing-​more-​than-​rejoice-​in-​the-​rest-​of-​the-​night, corresponds with an inhibited being, a not-​to-​care-​about-​anything that is authentic of us. In a way, we escape from ourselves, dwelling uneasiness [Unheimlichkeit], “the existential ‘mode’ of the “not-​at-​home” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 233). To postpone consists of being inauthentic in the celebration, and leaving the world of occupation. Postponing is a way of being that gives us time and is present in a thoroughness in which the temporality of the evening stops and spreads over the place. It covers us under the mantle of the momentary and shuts down the diversification of time in the past and future (in having-​been and will be). Because of this, any time-​spatial relationship becomes an uninterrupted present, framed in a single now that endures and ensnares this stretched standing in such a way that we are entirely there alongside and part of whatever is going on around us, i.e., in such a way that we are entirely present [ganz Gegenwart] for what is present [das Anwesende]. Entirely present [gegenwärtig] to the situation, we bring our time to a stand (Heidegger, 1995, p. 124). This temporality configures a present that extends generating a bolt on the past and detaching itself from the future. It is the rapture of the pure presence without identity in which we become one with the spirit of the celebration. Precisely, The Hour of the Wolf can provide some explanation regarding the representation of this paused time that extends and melts the Dasein with the event. We took for our analysis the scene when the painter and his wife are invited by Von Merkens to enjoy an evening in his vampire castle. As Javier Urrutia narrates (2016): In this extended sequence, Bergman gives us a series of technical resources worthy of a great filmmaker. The subjective plane is in the presentation of the Von Merkens and his companions. He puts us in the position of the couple, before being “initiated” in the evil. At the welcome dinner, the abrupt sweeps of the camera in hand, we enter into the insufferable conversations of the diners by means of decontextualized close-​ups, without any space center that accentuates its dislocation, which is also ours; the fire of the candles filmed in the first term haunts us as if it were an evil ceremony or a ritual of transit between worlds; […] after dinner, there is one of the most enigmatic moments of the film, the representation of the magic flute in that miniature theatre, articulated by the true ceremony master of the meeting, the archivist Lindhorst, clearly Lugosinian, if I am

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allowed the term. […] Bergman transforms a miniature puppet theatre into the sublime stage of an opera thanks to the magic of the setting and the cinematographic framing. It is a game of appearances and illusions that refers to the essence of cinema and fiction. The culmination of the Bergmanian hypnosis session concludes with a monologue by Lindhorst, who explains the meaning of the depicted scene, in which the young Tamino is lost and says: “Eternal Night when will you finish? When will the light touch my eyes?” The relationship of the couple with Von Merkens’ celebration develops the Heideggerian idea of the hobby from boredom in although they know something happens that arises a discomfort, they are unable to determine the origin. The meeting is the hobby; therefore, the only way out is to break the public sequence and end the eternal night from which one is inextricably part of. Such explanatory development states that the relationship of pastime with this type of boredom does not act in the same way as in the first case, where we had no time. It is located in the whole of the situation where we are. Since we take time for the meeting, the pastime itself is manifested to the extent of this same situational form, i.e., the hobby is the meeting that, in itself, ends up boring us: “We are held more toward ourselves, somehow enticed back into the specific gravity of Dasein, even though, indeed precisely because in so doing we leave our own proper self standing and unfamiliar” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 128). We understand this boredom does not originate from the outside. Instead, it happens in its way as it rises from the very existence to attend the call for care of the Dasein. This presentation is the prelude of the third and final form of boredom, ‘one gets bored,’ which is the most profound territory of our being and also condition to listen to what must be said and announced—​as Löwith says (1953): ‘let man remember himself.’ 5

‘Es ist einem langeweilig,’ or the Depth of Boredom

In the phenomenological Heideggerian analyses, the third form of boredom has been called profound boredom or ‘one gets bored’ [Es its einem langweilig], implying the need to reveal what is existentially profound, and meaning that we reach the point where existence requires us imperatively. Therefore, “in this ‘it is boring for one’ lies the fact that this boredom wishes to tell us something, and indeed not something arbitrary or contingent” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 135). We find something curious and radical in the sense that, in the form ‘one gets bored,’ any attempt to avoid boredom is useless; thus, ‘es ist einem langeweilig’

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“has already transported us into a realm of power over which the individual person, the public individual subject, no longer has any power” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 136), forcing us to hear what boredom, in its most acute stage, has to say. Not having a hobby is the determinant characterization of ‘one gets bored’ because the fact of lacking an event that impulses the appearance of such a boredom leaves it isolated from any associative example that could be easily digestible by the one who tries to elevate the comprehension on a represented image of the reality—​in which the hobby had a characteristic relevance. On this, Heidegger tries not to pass along, although he understands that it is unlikely to find an example where the critical moment is the following: To cite one possible, but entirely non-​binding occasion which has perhaps already been encountered by one or other of us, without our having explicitly noticed the emergence of this boredom and without our explicitly being annoyed of our own accord: ‘it is boring for one’ to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon (1995, p. 135). That Sunday in the afternoon comprises a factually boring determination, which, far from despair, leaves the person free to establish a connection with his own without the interruption of some external distractor element. This example is in the first scenes of The White Night, developed in the context of a silent and cold Sunday. A man gets off a bus near the place in which he is staying because he has recently arrived in the city and knows no one. Getting off the bus, he walks a little absorbed on the streets that do not enunciate anything and invade the character. As Dostoevsky (2011, p.  4) shows in his novel: “a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me”—​issue that expresses a mood [Stimmungen] that is “not seduced by too specific purposes, […] and one must know how to waste time, wandering, not striving for anything concrete, not proposing a purpose, not aspiring to anything determined” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 137). The way we are left empty in the one gets bored is shown in the entity that surrounds us, and that does not wake up a relevant interest. We are in such a rapture that what shows up in transit is deprived of occupation. It shows that the existence itself is, according to the manifestation of this fundamental temper of mind, given imperatively on the denied entity. This means that “through this boredom Dasein finds itself set in place […] to the extent that in this boredom the being that surround us offer us no further possibility of acting and no further possibility of our doing anything” (Heidegger, 1995, p.  139); precisely because emptiness moves the Dasein away the publicity and the compulsive

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contrariety “of the progress which oppresses the modern man and the feeling of loss that one warns on Sunday, when the machine rests” (Volpi, 2011, p. 146). Likewise, this refusal encloses an awakening that prepares oneself to listen attentively to what does not come from the ontic of the pure exteriority but enmeshes an internal happening, to what does not embody the subjective vision of interiority (solipsism) but the “ontological-​existential proximity of taking care [Sorge] in the saying of the self, and its fundamental as an existence or as an opening of hearing and responding to the original call of the self” (Echarri, 1997, p. 167). It comes from the structural moment of ‘one gets bored’ that happens specifically on a saying, in which “all telling refusal [Versagen] is in itself a telling [Sagen], i.e., a making manifest” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 140), and it is there where is produced this refusal, which announces and indicates the existential possibilities that “existentiality is essentially determined by facticity” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 236). To deny the entity, which intrudes us at the very root of existence, indicates the essential conditions of boredom are sharpened one after another by the superficiality to the ontological depth of the Dasein. As already stated above, being empty emerges as a fundamental moment of boredom—​worked on the interpretation of this type that tries to depart from the assimilation of serenity [Vergegnis der gelasenheit]—​to show that the existential states are indifferent, making clear the fact that the whole does not have much to say, and, then, it is essential to deny it so that the Dasein can open the mood as ‘state-​of-​resolve and fundamental determination of a true sameness—​in opposition to the being-​one’ (Löwith, 1953). Thus, the need of the refusal culminates by generating an annulled character that is consumed like the near horizon of the revealed temporality in “the expression ‘care for oneself’ ” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 366). To be more precise, it is the time that produces the existential annulment as temporality “is the primordial ‘outside-​of-​itself’ in and for itself” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 377). It is like the ecstasy of the instant [Augenblick], which means “the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 387). Consequently, postponing emerges naturally, granting the temporal position that is far from the conventions concerning the chronological time—​which collects unity in the image of the moment as a concretion element of experiential, and conceptual way of extending the ecstasy “as the fundamental possibility of Dasein’s existence proper” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 149), from which emerges an original existence. The prospective incursion of a first time (Kairoscore) that is according to the  one gets bored—​i.e.,  the instant—​generates this refusal of the entity in

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charge of the temporality. This form of the time is subjected to ontological prerogatives, evidenced in the Heideggerian appropriation of a time differential to chronological—​seen in the Kairos immediacy that “it is not a future that comes and is made present, but of the abrupt incursion of Ereignis time (appropriate event), as present in the dimension of the decision” (Másmela, 2000, p. 13). Such a temporal perspective is worked on Being and Time (ii, 45), and highlighted as a sense of the being of the Dasein (care), that is, anticipate a-​yes-​ being-​in-​the-​middle-​of-​the-​entity-​in-​joint that focused on the resolution to see if can recover from “the fall and (ex)-​sist more properly in the instant (Augenblick) covering the open situation” (Másmela, 2000, p. 343). For this reason, the German word Langeweile, translated into English as ‘boredom,’ literally relates to ‘the time gets long,’ giving us a light on the capacity of this moment that opens other foci on existential analyzes. This longtime enunciated in the boring [Langweiligkeit] does not attend to a specific moment that we lengthen producing a boredom, but a time that dominates to be in the midst of this entity from a constant confrontation, “an aspiration, a outgoing, a forward movement in which we are” (Mahop, 2011, p. 203). Thus, existence can be essential in a tiny fraction of time and, therefore, can be non-​essential with the time because this does not lie in the fact of watching the time of the clock or calendar but extending or shortening the own authentic time. ‘One gets bored’ implies assuming the existence from an original temporality, which does not originate itself from the normative conception of the time that submits us to an essential encounter with ourselves; this proves that existence is not something that can be assumed lightly but that it is necessary, for man, to interfere on it in a precise manner: if he is to become what he is, in each case has to throw Dasein upon his shoulders; […] Dasein is not something that one takes for a drive in the car as it were, but something that man must specifically take upon himself (Heidegger, 1995, p. 165). Not assuming the existence as being involved in the publicity of any of its ways, to avoid coming into contact with this gravity that we urgently care for—​ because “it loses the sharpness of the moment and the possibility of what is possible” (Lesmes, 2009, p. 171)—​indicates that this existence we have forgotten to assist has ended with the mystery: the pending look that brings us closer and closer to the inquiry by the world and ourselves. Therefore, the expression of boredom, rooted in the emptying of indigence and propitiating the instant as ecstasy of the temporal fringe, implies the need

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[Notwendigkeit] “of the ultimate demand [Zumutung] upon man” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 171), assuming that the last form of boredom maintains an ontological proximity. It removes the veils of the public and inhabits the improper occupation by the need to “free oneself from the rigid bonds of the worldliness and to be free and fully existing” (Hernández Albarracín, 2012, p. 246). This question makes the Dasein face the ontological oblivion that deposited the trust of the future in the modern technique. It requires a study that establishes a free subject, inhabitant of its existential situation, and who can take care of the ontic forms of domination that subordinate the original to the exigencies of the public surface where the one governs [das Man]. 6

Occupation of the Own and the Technological Relationships: Boredom in Modern Society

It is worth remembering that the Heideggerian thesis of technology as a totality of world possibilities accepts technological supremacy against any other possibility outside it—​idea that gave way to what is currently known as the technological boom (Heidegger, 1977). Despite the reality that this idea reveals, Heidegger insists on continuing to ask and argue about the technique to the constant inquiry by its essence—​an exercise initiated by Aristotle and that we should not dilute to the splendid autonomous technology. Philosophy must ask uncomfortable questions to cast doubt on technology. It is necessary to debate technological developments and projects. Otherwise, technology will pass in front of us with indifference, just as the unknown mentioned by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1974: 202): and time is indifferent, a stranger, like a stranger that passed by quietly in the street opposite without at all taking in our house, or looking at it, holding some opaque, unwashed panes under his armpit, you don’t know what he wants to do with them, where he’s taking them, what they are meant for and for what windows they’re destined and indeed you don’t even wonder and you don’t see him disappear either, discreet and silent, round the last bend of the street. This question catches our attention to evaluate the form one is bored, and the need of the human being to co-​evolve with modern technology in terms of rethinking how he relates to his habitat—​a creation that has happened by the

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technique. Co-​evolving, in its initial phase, implies the meaning of the human being, recognizing its place in the world and revealing the choice possibilities that it has on a horizon overwhelmed by the technology. As has been said, Martin Heidegger is not very comfortable with the advancement and development of technology. He considers that this has overwhelmed the humanist project; but, what is this overflow? In Being and Time, the Freiburg’s Professor says that the Dasein debates between an own attitude (Eingentlich = authentic)—​translated as ‘the care’ [die Sorge]—​and an improper one (Uneingentlich  =  inauthentic)—​translated as ‘the impersonal’ [das Man]. The existence presents a horizon of multiple possibilities where the human being decides to follow Das Man—​the impersonal behavior that takes him to act like the others—​or die Sorge—​the care of the being and the being-​there, the authentic behavior that allows him to decide for his existence. As a result of the exponential progress of technological development, the whole horizon of possibilities has developed, causing the declination of the die Sorge. As there is no more horizon than the technological, an authentic choice is impossible, even though the possibilities in the technological horizon multiply in each election. That is the reason why technology, for Heidegger, is uncomfortable, since it has removed in the Dasein the possibility of choosing an authentic existence. According to the German thinker, there was still a way to avoid this overflow, and it was his project to deconstruct traditional metaphysics and technology. This alternative was possible in Heidegger’s world. However, the present is entirely overwhelmed by technology because it has consumed the ‘now,’ and there is no more possible horizon than itself. In this sense, we can say that there are no more alternatives rather than selecting technology from an improper behavior [das Man]. Following the technological approach that emerges from the study carried out, it is in this contemporary vision in which the project of modern technology has surpassed the humanist project. Taking into account the imminent reality of a present and future society organized under the foundations and limits of technology, we have to move forward the configuration of this technological horizon: what is its substrate? What defines it? How does it act? How has it been created? A philosophy of technology, characterized under these issues, would be understood as a meta-​ontology2 since different visions of the world converge in their territory. The technology reveals common aspects that allow 2 Metaontology is understood as “that management that is common into two or more rival ontologies in the same tradition of thought and action” (Méndez Sanz, 2012, p. 148).

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the existence of the different senses of the being. Affirming that technology, as meta-​ontology, implies management that is beyond the rivalries and contradictions between the different ontologies allows the creation of new ontologies. Méndez Sanz (2012) proposes a meta-​ontological change that veers towards a different form of life experience (living and experiencing universal and human life). As he says, this change allows in its territory the existence of different traditional and common ontologies; however, it opens the meta-​ ontological possibility. Finally, once we have deployed technology, it will act as a platform that will allow the construction of new and different worlds (as mentioned above). It stops having that significant trait capable of organizing in the complex (which nowadays makes look like the most potent and fertile meta-​ontology) present the multiplication of possibilities that will allow the platform to dilute its ability to combine, sequence, and propose. However, technological development will remain and fill the horizon with its presence. Technology will not lose its power. Thus, once configured the technology as meta-​ontology, a platform in which the re-​elaborated concepts of world-​have-​reality will converge. This opening of the technological platform as a meta-​ontology overflows human possibilities and leads to its establishment as the only horizon. It also opens up to the multiplication of possibilities on the technological horizon. Under this vision, the becoming is uncertain and unthinkable. Retaking the Heideggerian idea—​which warns that if the human being does not have a project of his own that defines him as human, he will be overwhelmed by technology (the technological project)—​a little more than 50 years of the death of the German thinker, his prediction has become a reality: the present day is a reflection that technology is in all the spaces in the world built by the human being. The human is consumed in it, not as an amalgam but as someone who inhabits it. Finally, it is worth mentioning that two main features characterize this technological overflow: 1) The impossibility of human self-​realization. The human being must now consider himself as an entity with a project impossible to escape. He must seek his realization in him. This project may be real and proper of the Dasein. 2) It is irreversible. Reversing is not possible; everything done in today’s world will be created on the technological platform and under its horizon. So, the human being does not live in his project; he has abandoned himself to another project: the technological one. Now, what are the implications of living under the technological project? It is a technology that multiplies the construction of worlds, and we cannot even think about it because its possibilities of existence surpass human imagination.

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Conclusion

The phenomenological structure of the fundamental mood is “characterized by the fact that we are informed about the entirety of our historical situation by making perceptible the abysmal indigence of the subtraction oblivion” (Held, 1991, p. 34). Once awakened, we were led to establish ‘one gets bored’ as “the temporality of Dasein and thus the essence of time itself” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 173), which enables an understanding of existential temporality that is its root—​which, together and separately, Heidegger analyzes in his metaphysics: “the question concerning being: Being and Time” (1995, p. 173). Thus, the reflection on the fundamental mood generated an extensive knowledge of the circumstances in which the existence elapses, establishing a three-​stage trespass of the authentic existence that are managed according to a characterization that is used to have more clarity on the phenomenon addressed, “basically through an immersion phenomenon by which we let ourselves be carried away by the closeness of the things, a phenomenon that turns its back on the classical mechanisms of representative thought” (Escudero, 2014, p. 42). So, this journey along the paths of existence in search of the fundamental mood, and the reflection on the three forms of boredom (‘by’, ‘in’, and ‘one gets bored’) does not indicate, in any measure, that they are bounded each other to experience some of the described types; the others must be exhausted as causal instances. On the contrary, the forms of boredom indicate their existential states that emerge according to the factual nature of the relationship between the Dasein and the world, because the ‘is ist einem Langeweilig’ man can be bored by things and men around him (Heidegger, 1995). Finally, this study on the forms of boredom develops a thought position that will try, in other scenarios, to think the severity of one gets bored with the inspection of the world, and the finiteness and loneliness from the definition of Heideggerian thought, polarized between the attention to the individual and his most profound experiences (anguish, death, Sorge), and the belonging to the world as a whole (Vattimo, 1971). We propose a critical look at modernity from the forgetfulness of being and the technical philosophy to think about our current situation.

Bibliography

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Cavallé Cruz, M. (2001). Naturaleza del yo en el Vedanta Advaita, a la luz de la crítica al sujeto de Heidegger [The Nature of the Self in the Vedanta Advaita, from the Heideggerian Critique of the Subject], Doctoral Dissertation, Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid. Dostoevsky, F. (2011). The White Nights. Auckland: The Floating Press. Echarri, J. (1997). Fenómeno y verdad en Heidegger [Phenomenon and Truth in Heidegger]. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Escudero, J.A. (2007). Hacia una fenomenología de los afectos: Martin Heidegger y Max Scheler [Toward a Phenomenology of Affects: Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler]. Thémata. Revista de filosofía 39, pp. 365–​368. Escudero, J.A. (2014). En torno al aburrimiento (o de la importancia de los estados de ánimo en la filosofía de Heidegger) [On Boredom (or the Importance of Emotions in Heidegger’s Philosophy)]. Revista Estudio 18, pp. 33–​43. Foucault, M. (1988). Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault. In: L.H. Martin, ed., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock, pp. 9–​15. García Aguilar, R. (2006). La frase de Nietzsche “Dios ha muerto” según Martín Heidegger [Nietzsche’s Sentence “God is Dead” According to Martin Heidegger]. Inter Sedes vii (12), pp. 213–​221. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. New York/​London: Garland Publishing. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Bloomington/​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2014a). Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven/​London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M. (2014b). Hölderlin’s Hymns. “Germania” and The Rhine.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Held, K. (1991). Grundbestimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger [Fundamental Mood and Criticism of Contemporary Culture in Heidegger]. In:  D. Papenfuß, and O. Pöggeler, eds., Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Volume 1. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, pp. 31–​56. Hernández Albarracín, J.D. (2012). Aburrimiento y poesía: revisión de la obra poética de Alejandra Pizarnik desde el concepto de aburrimiento (Langeweile) en Martin Heidegger [Boredom and Poetry: Review of the Poetic Work of Alejandra Pizarnik from the Concept of Boredom (Langeweile) in Martin Heidegger]. Revista de Filosofía UIS 11 (1), pp. 227–​252. Hernández Albarracín, J.D. (2016). De Heidegger a Morin:  una interpretación desde la superación metafísica a los fundamentos de la complejidad [From Heidegger to Morin: An Interpretation from the Metaphysical Overcoming to the Fundamentals of Complexity]. Revista de Filosofía 84 (3), pp. 59–​88.

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­c hapter 5

Too Much Time: Changing Conceptions of Boredom, Progress, and the Future among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia, 2003–​2015 Daniel Mains Abstract In the context of unprecedented rates of urban unemployment, in the early 2000s, young men in Ethiopia struggled with an overabundance of time. We examine changes in urban young men’s experiences of time and progress over 30 years to better understand the nature of boredom and modernity. Young men simultaneously experienced a sense of linear progress in their own lives, and feelings of frustration when shifts in their built environment did not translate into a more abstract sense of change. Ultimately, we argue that, in contrast to conceptions of boredom that emerge out of the West, Ethiopian boredom was profoundly social in the sense that its origin is on an inability to experience progress in one’s relations of reciprocity with others.

Keywords boredom –​ Ethiopia –​ Modernity –​ progress –​ time

‘In Ethiopia, there is too much time. Tomorrow is very far from today. The evening is very far from the afternoon. There is no difference between today, yesterday, and tomorrow.’1 In the early 2000s, statements such as this were famous among unemployed young men in Jimma, Ethiopia. They complained—​‘we live like chickens, we are just eating and sleeping’—​to express their frustration with their inability to experience change over time. A life of ‘eating and sleeping,’ or ‘simply sitting,’ was contrasted with the Amharic term lout. Lout generally refers to change, but there are many types of change. Young men

1 The editor would like to thank the journal Focaal (Berghahn Books) for allowing us to re-​ publish this work after having been reviewed by the author for this occasion.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_007

114 Mains often used lout to imply qualitative improvement over time in a way that is best captured by the concept of progress. ‘Living like chickens’ implies that life lacked meaning, only moving here and there without any purpose besides filling one’s stomach. Ideally, life would proceed along with a series of incremental improvements, but, with rates of unemployment at close to 50 percent, most young men saw themselves, in ten years, living with their parents and unable to marry or start a family of their own. They complained of having too much unstructured time, and those introspective thoughts about one’s future were a source of unease. Unlike the time-​space compression described by David Harvey (1989) for the West, for many youths in Ethiopia the inability to experience progress, in the sense of actualizing a future that is different from one’s present (Koselleck, 1985), caused time to expand rather than contract, producing a sensation similar to Western notions of boredom. In this chapter, we explore the interrelationship between economic shifts, boredom, and conceptions of progress. We argue that boredom emerges specifically out of a failure to actualize expectations of progress. Philosopher Elizabeth Goodstein writes, in her book Experience without Qualities, “[b]‌oredom marks the discrepancy between the actual and the imagined” (2005, p. 124). Goodstein’s analysis of the emergence of discourses concerning boredom in 19th century-​Europe provides a useful lens on the contemporary Ethiopian case because, in both situations, people are highly concerned with progress and temporality. Notions of progress appear at a certain point in history when the relationship between experience and expectations shifts (Koselleck, 1985). What one has experienced in the past generates expectations for the future. However, as people begin to believe in the inevitability of progress, this changes. In discussing the advent of progress concerning increased technological innovation in Europe, Reinhart Koselleck explains that “[w]hat was new was that the expectations that reached out for the future became detached from all that previous experience had to offer” (1985, p. 279). In other words, what determines faith in progress is the expectation that the future will not be like what one has experienced in the past and, instead, it will be qualitatively better. Goodstein argues that the conception of progress described by Koselleck “constitutes the condition of possibility for modern boredom” (2005, pp. 122–​ 123). Boredom is not only the sensation of having too much time; it is also the sense that the passage of time and day-​to-​day experience are not meaningful because they do not conform to expectations of progress. Yasmine Musharbash offers a similar conclusion based on her ethnographic study of an Australian Aboriginal settlement. Musharbash explains that “boredom arises when values and circumstances fail to correspond, when ways of being in the world and the world jar” (2007, p. 315). Musharbash notes that this

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disjuncture between values and experience is always socioculturally specific, and we examine disjunctures between expectations and realities regarding shifts in young men’s social relationships. We begin by exploring the roots of young men’s expectations of progress, and the particular conceptualization of progress in urban Ethiopia. Based on research conducted from 2003 to 2005, we argue that young men conceived of progress in terms of specific movement through the life course, the accumulation of dependents, and changes in their social relationships. When those changes were not actualized, young men struggled with an overabundance of time and an overwhelming sense of boredom. I occasionally returned to Jimma over the next decade and followed the lives of my research participants as Ethiopia passed through a period of dramatic economic growth. In the second half of the chapter, we examine changes in economic opportunity and urban infrastructural development that occurred between 2005 and 2015. As young men found employment or reentered the education system, their temporal relationship to the present and future changed, and boredom was largely erased. However, a disjuncture between expectations for the future and one’s experience remained. Young men’s urban environment underwent a dramatic transformation with the construction of new roads and high-​rise buildings in the city center. In speaking about urban growth, young men expressed frustration with a gap between actual and imagined changes in their city, but not in a way we can characterize as boredom. We use this additional case of a mismatch between expectations and realities for the passage of time to better identify the specific characteristics of Ethiopian boredom. In contrast to other types of frustration with temporal change and boredom, young men’s broader struggles with time embedded in social relationships. More generally, we argue that analyses of temporal change and related concepts like progress must give attention to specific practices and values regarding social relationships. 1

Education and Expectations of Work

Extremely high rates of urban youth unemployment and the emergence of boredom among young men in the 1990s and early 2000s were due to a simultaneous expansion of education and contraction of economic opportunity.2

2 As I have argued elsewhere (Mains, 2007; 2012a), Ethiopian values concerning occupational status also played a significant role in causing unemployment.

116 Mains The value of education in Ethiopia emerged during the mid-​20th century, together with the development of permanent residential populations in many urban centers. During this period, the prestige and desirability of government employment as an urban occupation developed in Jimma. The prestige of government work is in the traditional hierarchical relationship between nobility and farmers. As Allan Hoben (1970) explains, in describing Addis Ababa under the reign of Haile Sellasie, the government administrator replaced the traditional nobility, and education took the place of military activity as a means for accessing social mobility. Owning land and a more prolonged presence in the city increased one’s chances of obtaining an education. To finish secondary school virtually guaranteed one the position as an administrator or teacher. At this point, an occupational hierarchy between those with or without government work began to develop. Government workers had both political and economic power, while others generally performed the service work and manual labor necessary to maintain life in the city. For the generation made up of the parents of the youth in my study, who came of age under Haile Sellasie (1941–​1974) and the early part of the Derg regime (1974–​1991), education was the key to accessing status through government employment. By the early 1990s, most urban youths were completing their primary education, and around half had, at least, some secondary education (csa, 1999). In general, these youth aspired to use their education to access government employment, but, for most, it was not possible. Under the Derg, the public sector also expanded, and while it may not have been able to absorb all secondary school graduates, it certainly prevented the extremely high levels of unemployment that began in the 1990s. In contrast, the structural adjustment policies mandated by the International Monetary Fund during the 1990s drastically downsized the Ethiopian public sector and eliminated many of the jobs that the growing population of secondary school graduates expected and desired. The total urban unemployment rate for individuals between the ages of 10 and 65 rose from 7.9 percent, in 1984, to 22 percent, in 1994, and 26.4 percent in 1999, with young people forming the bulk of the unemployed (Bizuneh et al., 2001). Rates of unemployment for young people were particularly high, and, in the mid-​1990s, around 50 percent of urban young men between the ages of 15 and 30 were unemployed, meaning their main activity did not include wage employment, casual work, or work in the informal private sector (Serneels, 2007). Nearly all unemployed young men were actively looking for work (Serneels, 2007, p. 173). I used a similar definition of employment in my study and considered young men to be unemployed if they were not performing work for payment more than once per week and were actively seeking employment.

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Students of the 1990s and early 2000s were very different from the elite group of the past. With the increase in the number of students, the quality of education declined. A typical secondary school classroom contained 80 to 90 students, sharing books and learning in English, a language many students did not understand well. In 1994, only around 10 percent of young people between the ages of 20 and 29 had advanced to postsecondary education (csa, 1999). Although the few youths who obtained a postsecondary degree were generally able to access desirable government employment, the vast majority left school with few practical skills and little hope of securing employment. The decrease in the value of education created a gap between one’s probable life trajectory and aspirations. In the absence of jobs that young people believed were fitting with their education status, urban Ethiopian youth of all class backgrounds, in the early 2000s, frequently accepted extended periods of unemployment. In urban areas, during the late 1990s, rates of unemployment were higher among young people with secondary education than those with lower levels of education (Serneels, 2007). The ability to wait for work that fits one’s level of education and remain unemployed for a long time is a reflection of the relatively privileged social and economic position occupied by most urban young men. The unemployed young men in my study represented a variety of class backgrounds, but all of them were born and raised in the city, and this provided a distinct advantage concerning Ethiopia’s predominantly rural population. Even youth from low-​income families had extended social networks that provided them with the support necessary to remain unemployed for several years. That said, all of the young men in my study who worked in the informal economy were from low-​income families; this was not a route pursued by middle-​class young men. Many young men from low-​income families were able to use their social networks to support themselves during extended periods of unemployment, but this was much easier for young men from middle-​ class families than those from low-​income families. 2

Progress and the Problem of Time

Education not only created expectations among urban youth that they would be able to access high-​status government employment, but it also conditioned them to expect progress in their lives. Education is a progressive process in that it involves gradual linear improvements. As one advances from grade to grade, one assumes that this movement has created a change within one’s self as well. The educated individual expects a transformation so that his future will be better than the present. Contrasts between unemployment and life as a

118 Mains student are revealing. In the early 2000s, many young men in Jimma had completed secondary school and remained unemployed after graduation. For these young men, the school was the last time they were involved in a structured activity. One difference from unemployment is that school makes a person very busy and, therefore, eliminates the problem of passing excessive amounts of time. Possibly more significant is one’s relationship to his future. As one young man who had been unemployed for two years after completing grade 12 put it, ‘when I was a student, I had no thoughts. I learned, I studied, and I didn’t worry about the future. Now I always think about the future. I don’t know how long this condition will last. Maybe it will be the same year after year.’ In contrast to student life, days pass with unemployment, but one’s material and social positions remain the same. Long-​term unemployment prevented youth from imagining a desirable future and placing their lives within a narrative of progress. Because of the expansion of education and urbanization, the young men I studied were far more embedded in an ideology of progress through education than previous generations were. Most urban youths were the sons and daughters of parents who did not advance beyond primary education. Despite living through a Marxist revolution that was associated with particular notions of modernity (Donham, 1999), their lack of education meant that the parents of youth in my study often did not internalize an ideology of progress as it pertained to their own lives. The mother of an unemployed young man explained, ‘today’s generation is different. They are educated, and they know the world. Today they want so many things.’ In describing their life histories, most parents spoke of the movement from a rural area to Jimma as a significant shift in their life. Upon arriving in Jimma, they generally accepted whatever work was available and were not as concerned with issues of status as their children. Parents often argued that their children’s lives should be different from their own, precisely because of their children’s higher level of education, and they were disappointed when this was not the case. Young men’s expectations were structured less by their parents’ careers than state-​directed efforts to expand access to education. Through formal education, the state promoted an international discourse of modernization that shifted young men’s expectations concerning the future and, ultimately, their experience of boredom. In the Ethiopian case, ideals concerning progress as incremental improvements in one’s life over time were explicitly conceptualized in terms of linear changes in social relationships. Young men’s narratives of aspiration typically began with education, followed by work, and then helping younger siblings before moving out of one’s parents’ home to marry and start a family. Finally, young men believed one should support his parents and, if possible, create a project or business that would benefit his community. Most urban youths were

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able to attain the first step in this narrative and pursue their education to the secondary level, but they were unable to find employment, and this created a dead-​end in their pursuit of aspirations. Many young men believed that nearly insurmountable financial barriers prevented them from dating, marriage, and having children. They claimed they would not marry before the age of 30 or 35 and then only if they had become wealthy. Children were the natural and desirable result of marriage—​the next step in youth narratives of aspiration—​and the financial burden of raising children was an additional factor preventing young men from achieving their aspirations. To raise children did not involve any considerable costs, but most young men desired a future for their children better than their own. The following quote comes from an unemployed young man who first explained to me that he would not accept available forms of work like carpentry or waiting tables because they would not allow him and his family to experience progress: Without something big [a source of money], I  won’t even think about marriage or children. Even if I am rich, I will never have more than two children. With two kids, I  can educate them properly so that they can reach the university. If they don’t reach the university, I will send them to America. Of course, I could get a job and have children now. Even if I was only making 100 birr [about $12 at that time] a month, I could feed them shuro,3 but that kind of life is not good for children. They will not learn properly, and they will end up shining shoes or something like that. You want your children to have a better life than yourself. You want them to improve and have a good life. The emphasis on raising one’s children differently from one’s self so that they may have a better life was universal among young men. Opposing education and small families with symbols of working-​class urban life, like shuro and sharing rooms, emphasized different future trajectories. Young men conceived progress in terms of not only repositioning themselves within social relationships but ensuring that one’s children enjoy this status as well. The underlying problem was that the smooth transition between education and officialdom that would support incremental changes in young men’s social relationships had been ruptured. Young men sought to raise a family in which their children would lead to modern progressive lives that involve more than

3 Shuro is a flavorful chickpea sauce eaten with injera. It is inexpensive and, many families eat it at least once a day.

120 Mains ‘eating and sleeping.’ They could not access the economic resources necessary to take on the normative responsibilities of adults, and, therefore, they could not move through time in the manner they desired. Young men were in the ambiguous position of aspiring to achieve progressive changes in their social relations but lacking any faith that this could happen. 3

The Overaccumulation of Time

Young men’s temporary problem was the result of both their relationship to the future and the experience of time in the present. Mainly as a result of their inability to achieve progressive changes in their relationships with others, young men experienced unstructured time as an overabundant and potentially dangerous quantity. For young men, the most salient quality of time was its lack of structure, and it was something to be ‘passed’ [yasallefal] or ‘killed’ [yasgedal]. This experience of time is increasingly common in Africa and much of the Global South. As young people fail to attain aspirations, they become frustrated with an inability to place their own lives within a hopeful narrative (Weiss, 2004; Hansen, 2005; Musharbash, 2007; Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey, 2008; Ralph, 2008; Schielke, 2008; Jeffrey, 2010). The burden of too much time was a privilege of gender and urban residence. Unlike rural young men who contributed a great deal of labor to family farms, young men in cities were expected to do very little household work and were generally free from participating in any activities directly associated with the reproduction of the household. In contrast, young women spent nearly all of their time doing tedious housework. While young men expressed an interest in working partially as an escape from boredom, young women explained that the best part of their day included activities like drinking coffee with friends when they were free to relax and socialize. The problem of the ‘too much unstructured time’ was that it led to introspective thinking and feelings of stress. ‘Thought’ [assab] was a crucial term in these narratives representing a broad range of feelings, including stress and depression, and they often described ‘thoughtlessness’ as a desired emotional state. As one unemployed young man explained, ‘when I am alone with too much time, I think too much. This is the worst part of the day. I think about my future. For how long will I live with my parents? Will my life ever change?’ Young men did not want to think about their continued dependence on their family, their inability to marry, and the indefinite continuation of their joblessness. Time stretched in front of the youth, and the future seemed relatively inevitable but not desirable.

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With limited prospects for attaining progress, young men’s temporal experiences resonated with what Jane Guyer (2007) describes as a shift from the ‘near future’ to the ‘long term’ or ‘prophetic time.’ Rather than experiencing ‘incremental time’ (Smith, 2011) through work and education, young men found themselves dreaming of a distant future in which their lives were different. Young men passed their time with layers and layers of chewata, a style of conversation and joking that translates as ‘play.’ As one unemployed young man claimed, ‘when I am with my friends, I don’t think. If there is good chewata, I don’t worry about the future.’ This comment reflects a very particular notion of ‘think’ and ‘the future.’ As they passed the time with each other, young men avoided worries about the near future and attaining the next stage in a linear narrative of progressive changes within social relationships that often plagued them when they were alone. As a different young man explained, ‘being alone is the worse part of my day. This is when I feel stress and think too much. I start thinking about my future and wondering what I will do. Usually, if I am alone in the afternoon, I try to fall asleep and forget about my life.’ However, mainly while chewing khat (a mild stimulant), conversations among friends often involved the imagination of hopeful futures. These conversations consistently focused on the distant future. Young men talked of traveling to the United States, finding work, and eventually returning to Ethiopia with a great deal of wealth. At least for the moment, these fantasies were believable. Young men imagined going to the United States through the Diversity Visa lottery, a random and complete transformation that would radically remake their lives without requiring passage through a series of linear changes. Young men’s intensive focus on the horizon of the distant future had a reciprocal relationship with their experience of the present. The present increasingly became nothing more than a waiting period for a future transformation. Social relationships were still at the heart of this narrative—​young men wished to use international travel to reposition themselves concerning others—​but this was not the gradual repositioning they had previously imagined. The failure to actualize narratives of progress left young men stuck in the present, bored, and waiting for change. 4

“Africa Rising,” a Developmental State, and the End of Boredom

After completing my long-​term research with unemployed young men, I  returned to Jimma several times. On each of these follow-​up trips, I tracked down the youth who were involved in my research. When we met, they no longer spoke of boredom and having too much time. I occasionally heard complaints

122 Mains about the length of the day or the desire to kill time, but this was not the dominant refrain I had encountered in the early 2000s. Instead, these men, many of whom no longer fit well in the category of youth, inserted themselves into new temporal narratives. As we will see, these narratives do not necessarily conform to the progressive ideals voiced in the early 2000s. The passage of time was still crucial for young men, but they placed more emphasis on the near, rather than distant, future. This shifting relationship to time and the future is grounded in broader political-​economic changes, some global and some specific to Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, the beginning of the 21st century was a peculiar combination of unprecedented economic growth and daily struggles to access basic needs. Journalists and scholars have suggested that Ethiopia is an example of ‘Africa rising’ or ‘emerging Africa’ (Mahajan, 2009; Radelet, 2010). Ethiopia’s gross domestic product (gdp) grew at a rate of more than 8 percent annually between 2001 and 2010, and this growth has continued during the current decade (Economist, 2011). The Ethiopian government has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure to achieve this goal (African Business, 2011). Beginning in the early 2000s, unemployment rates among urban young men in Ethiopia began to drop significantly (Broussar and Gebrekidan Tekleselassie, 2012). However, most of the urban Ethiopians I know laugh at claims of economic security and improved day-​to-​day lives. Beginning with the global food crisis in 2008, the cost of staple foods rose dramatically in Ethiopia, forcing many families to skip meals (Ulimwengu, Workneh, and Paulos, 2009). Urban Ethiopians jokingly formed new words by combining the Amharic terms for breakfast and lunch, but rather than a leisurely meal on a Sunday morning, these ‘brunches’ are daily and an essential means of skipping meals to save money. The value of the Ethiopian birr had held steady at roughly 8.5:1 in comparison with the U.S. dollar for some years until rampant inflation began around 2008. In 2015, one U.S. dollar was equal to more than 20 Ethiopian birr. For the many urban Ethiopians who depended on government salaries that had not kept up with inflation, this meant the price of day-​to-​day necessities more than doubled. The decline in youthful narratives of boredom occurred in this context of economic growth and an increasing struggle to get by. Unemployed young men explained that the networks of reciprocity they had relied on in the past had dried up. Sons of government employees and pensioners could no longer rely on support from their parents. Waiting for desirable work was no longer an option. The marginal degree of privilege that allowed many young men—​including those from low-​income families—​to be bored was erased.

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At the same time, after losing to the opposition in nearly all urban centers in the 2005 election,4 Ethiopia’s ruling party began to make massive investments in urban infrastructure. In contrast to Peter Radelet’s (2010) claim that the long-​term impacts of structural adjustment policies and the downsizing of the public sector have to do with recent economic growth in emerging Africa, growth in Ethiopia is closely linked with state investment in roads, hydropower dams, education, and urban microcredit schemes aimed at creating jobs. Particularly after 2005, much of this investment occurred in cities. Although causal relationships are difficult to determine, it is likely that government policies related to education and job creation, in particular, contributed to the decrease in unemployment. The Ethiopian state has vastly expanded opportunities for postsecondary education, meaning that many young people who finish secondary school are not immediately entering the labor force. Full-​time public university enrollment increased from 34,000 in 2000, to 125,000, in 2007, and more than 70 percent of these students were men (Reisberg and Rumbley, 2010). In the early 2000s, there were only three public universities in the country, but by 2014 there were more than 30. At the same time, postsecondary technical training schools have opened throughout the country. The state has also organized young people to work on infrastructural development projects and provided loans to youth for starting small businesses. These opportunities for education and work are primarily available to men, and this may explain why unemployment rates among young women have remained stable. Many of the young men involved in my long-​term research in the early 2000s found opportunities in postsecondary education and state-​supported infrastructural development. When I had last seen him in 2005, Habtamu was in his mid-​20 and had been unemployed for more than three years. At that time, he spent most of his time chewing khat. He told me, ‘I am afraid of the future. Every day is the same. Next year I need to have a change, either good work or education. If I can’t do this, then I would rather die than continue this way.’ When I visited Jimma in 2008, Habtamu invited me to the house he shared with his older sister. We sat on overstuffed sofas, sipping strong cups of coffee, gossiping about other young men from the neighborhood, and discussing his plans for the future. His siblings, who lived in the United States, had begun paying for him to study

4 Due to irregularities in the voting process, opposition members refused to take the parliament seats they had won in the 2005 election. When widespread protests began to erupt, elected opposition party officials were imprisoned, and their seats eventually were given to members of the ruling party.

124 Mains toward his bachelor’s degree in Jimma University’s engineering program.5 He was currently in his 3rd year of the 6-​year evening study program, and he was confident in finding employment after graduation. I did not get the impression that he was in a hurry to complete the program. Returning to school seemed to provide Habtamu with the sense of satisfaction and direction he previously lacked. He still chewed khat. However, studying in the afternoon and evening classes provided him with a focus on his mental energy. Khat was no longer a means to kill time; instead, it supported study, an activity Habtamu perceived as productive because of its role in supporting the movement toward a desirable future. Habtamu was moving toward a bright and socially approved goal. He was immersed in the progressive linear change that many urban Ethiopians associate with education. If Habtamu struggled with the maintenance of hope in the past, he now seemed to be quite confident that, through education, his future would be better and more desirable than the present. When I revisited him in 2009, our conversations continued to focus on education. Habtamu claimed he would not be satisfied with a bachelor’s degree, and he hoped to pursue a master’s. This would qualify him to teach at the university level and enable him to continue his involvement in education for the foreseeable future. I have not seen Habtamu since 2009, but his family reports that he is working as an electrical engineer at a government-​owned sugar factory in the remote, and extremely hot, Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia. For Habtamu, education and work supported the economic independence that many young men associate with progress and becoming an adult. The sugar factory in Afar is just one of the state-​sponsored projects that have created job opportunities for young men. Other young men have left Jimma to work on asphalt road construction and hydropower dams. They have gradually changed their position in the relations of reciprocity with their family, increasingly providing support for their parents and siblings. Although breaks in construction projects often necessitate a return to their parents’ home, over the years, the young men who have found work on these projects take on more of the normative responsibilities of adult men. Like Habtamu, Holyfield, who takes his nickname from the boxer his friends think he resembles, was an unemployed young man who participated in my 2003–​2005 research. In those days, I consistently found him hanging out on a corner with a couple of friends, talking and passing the time. I spent a good 5 Habtamu’s relatives in the United States paid for evening courses. Most youths did not have these resources, but the expansion of the postsecondary education system created numerous opportunities for students to attend government universities at a minimal cost.

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deal of time with Holyfield during my visits to Jimma in 2012 and 2015. He was working on a joint government/​international nongovernmental organization project, constructing cobblestone roads in Jimma.6 Urban cobblestone road construction began around 2008, and within five years, 100,000 temporary jobs had been created. Although the work required heavy manual labor and was not highly paid, Holyfield took great pride in it. He described his work with phrases like ‘working for injera,’ ‘working to live,’ and ‘living hand to mouth.’ These were nearly the exact phrases that had been used to denigrate available work in the early 2000s. However, now, Holyfield claimed that even if work did not bring a high profit, it still has value. Indeed, many young men in Jimma still argued against the value of ‘working to live,’ but Holyfield demonstrates an attitude I found among other formerly unemployed young men who adopted narratives heavily focused on the present. Holyfield explained that the most significant change resulting from work was his mental health: ‘this is the most important thing. Before life was very stressful, always thinking about the future. Now, I am so busy with work that I have no time for thoughts. I work, take a shower, eat, and then sleep. My mind is free, and it feels good.’ A different young man who was working in asphalt road construction described his life as ‘work, pray, work, pray, work, pray.’ In these narratives, the space of waiting, doing nothing, and having too much time is erased. Repetition is not a problem as long as life provides little space for thought and contemplation of the future. At the same time, despite the emphasis on ‘living hand to mouth,’ Holyfield and other young men were earning incomes and experiencing changes in their social relationships with others. In 2012, Holyfield’s financial independence had expanded significantly. Previously, he had worked as a laborer on cobblestone projects. By 2012, he had organized a cobblestone construction company with other young men—​many of whom he had passed a great deal of time with when they were unemployed—​and this gave him access to a much higher share of the profits. He had opened a savings account at a bank and was saving money to obtain a driver’s license. He had built a separate room for himself off his parents’ house and furnished the room with his purchases. Holyfield consistently espoused a narrative associating work with respect. ‘A person who does not work is not respected. This sort of person is a duriye. He has dirty clothes and bad hair. If youth from the neighborhood ask me for money, I tell them to come to our construction site, and I will teach them how to work.’ By 2015, Holyfield got married, and his wife was expecting their first child. He had 6 I argue elsewhere (Mains, 2012b) that cobblestone workers categorized their jobs as ‘government work,’ and maintaining a relationship with the state was an essential incentive for accepting these jobs.

126 Mains used his savings from his cobblestone work to purchase a 3-​wheeled motorcycle taxi that he leased to a friend, both creating work for his friend and gaining an additional source of income for himself. Referring to his ability to accumulate dependents and take on the responsibilities of an adult, Holyfield proudly told me there had had progress in his life. The changing temporal experiences of young men in Jimma further demonstrate the relationship between boredom and progress. Boredom was eased when young men were able to reconnect with narratives of progress. This fact occurred partially through the creation of employment opportunities that allowed young men to work, support their extended family, and begin to establish families of their own. A revision of young men’s conceptions of progress was also part of this process. Young men placed higher intrinsic value on the act of working, evaluating time spent in the present not only as a means to something else but as an end in itself. In this process, the future moved closer. Life was no longer centered on waiting for the distant future; instead, there was a return to the near future, and working to achieve particular steps in a linear process of becoming. Life in the present began to take on qualitative value as it became useful for moving toward the near future. 5

Growth without Change: Boredom and the Changing Urban Landscape

The same urban infrastructural development projects that created job opportunities for young men have transformed the urban landscape. These projects created another source of change in the lives of young men as their lived environment remakes. In Jimma, major urban asphalt road construction projects began in 2009, and, although the road construction did not go smoothly, many of the roads were finished by the end of 2014. Particularly in the central Mercado neighborhood, new high-​rise buildings accompanied the new roads. The municipal government resettled families to more peripheral areas to make room for this new construction. As I  returned to Jimma for brief visits, conversations turned away from young men’s individual lives and focused on the changes in the city. Young men used the same Amharic word, lout, which I have translated as progress, to refer to the transformations in the city. In referencing urban transformation, lout takes on a different meaning than the experience of progress within social relationships that we described above. Young men often began our discussions of Jimma with, ‘Lout alleh?’—​‘Has there been lout?’ They wanted my response to this question, and even more so, they wanted to give me their assessment. In

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these discussions, it quickly became apparent that, at times, people used lout to refer to the physical growth of the city, and, at other times, lout referenced a more abstract sense of change that could provide satisfaction if experienced at a personal level. Many young men claimed that Jimma had experienced significant growth, pointing to the new 5-​story hotel on the corner where Holyfield and his friends once spent hours passing the time in the shade. They also pointed out the new cobblestone roads, some of them built by Holyfield’s company, and praised the reduction in mud and dust. Although some of the growth had occurred slowly, with a great deal of starting and stopping, by 2015, Jimma residents generally acknowledged that the city had grown dramatically in the past five years. However, many did not equate these changes with a more profound sense of change. They stated: ‘there is no change’ [Lout yellem]. Some of these critiques focused on delays in the construction process. ‘Roads are never finished, they only produce dust,’ noted one acquaintance of mine, regarding the asphalt resurfacing projects that were delayed for multiple years without completion. There were many finished roads and buildings, but this still did not bring a sense of change for many residents. In 2015, I ran into one of the young men who had been involved in my research in the early 2000s. I had not seen him since 2005. He had traveled to the Gambella region, on the edge of the Ethiopia/​South Sudan border, to work on a rice plantation, and had only recently returned to Jimma. He was working as a construction foreman on one of the new buildings going up in the Mercado, a neighborhood where his parents had lived before being forced to leave to make room for new commercial development. We sat in a rooftop café, sipping a macchiato, looking out at all the new buildings that had gone up in the neighborhood. Where once there were simple shops made from corrugated tin, there were now 4-​and 5-​story cement buildings, filled with shops and cafés. ‘This is only for the rich,’ he claimed. ‘It does nothing for the poor.’ Pointing across the street at one of the new high-​rises, he noted, ‘these buildings are empty.’ He clarified he referred not only to some empty spaces for rent but also to the fact that so many of the shops offered the same goods and services. Cafés, mobile phone shops, Internet access—​many of the shops sold the opportunity to connect with others. In contrast, this young man claimed there was no reliable access to water, electricity, and phone networks. A frequent comment I heard from Jimma residents was: ‘what good are new buildings and roads when there is no water and electricity?’ From this perspective, growth was empty. There were undoubtedly new physical structures, but these contrast with a deeper form of change that would go beyond transforming the landscape and transform people’s lives.

128 Mains Also, in 2015, I spent a morning wandering through a residential neighborhood with Getachew, another young man who had participated in my earlier research. As we walked along the new cobblestone roads, he commented on how much the neighborhood had grown. At some point, we turned off the cobblestone onto a dirt road to make our way to Getachew’s home, where he continued to live with his mother and siblings. As soon as we were off the cobblestone, the road turned into the thick and slippery mud that I remembered from when I lived in Jimma ten years before. Suddenly, the conversation shifted. Now, he was telling me there had been no change; everything is the same. We slowly picked our way along the muddy path until we reached his family’s small two-​room house. Like Habtamu, Getachew had found a way to return to school, taking evening courses for a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at Jimma University. He showed me the yearbook and photos from when he had completed his diploma at the technical college a couple of years ago. Getachew had reentered the narrative of progressive changes in one’s life associated with education. He was quite proud of this, and he immediately announced his educational status when we first ran into each other. However, once we moved away from the asphalt and cobblestone into the interior neighborhoods, where the majority of Jimma’s population resided, the experience of the city shifted. It became a world of stasis rather than one of change. These men did not complain about boredom as they once did. They were working and attending school, many of them increasingly confident that they were experiencing a linear change in their lives as they gradually repositioned themselves within relations of reciprocity. However, living in a context of rapid urban growth appears to have introduced new doubts about the meaning of change. Growth occurred, but access to necessities like water and electricity was increasingly unreliable. There was a new asphalt road and a 5-​story hotel just minutes from Getachew’s home, but what did that do for him? There was some initial excitement about the novelty of these developments, but the reality of the muddy path leading to Getachew’s home was left unchanged. In Jimma, growth was occurring, but many people were still waiting for change. Jimma residents’ reactions to the roads and buildings that are associated with the state’s developmental policies demonstrate how dissatisfaction with the passage of time may emerge in different ways—​particularly in places like urban Ethiopia, where transformations of the lived environment can be rapid, and residents are continually bombarded by state propaganda concerning development, evaluating the passage of time is an everyday activity. Urban residents critically questioned the state’s claims about successful development. In Jimma, this meant acknowledging growth but denying the attainment of

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an abstract sense of change experienced at a personal level. That did not necessarily lead to a sense of boredom, or an overabundance of time, but it did create a different sort of temporal angst. Even as the Ethiopian developmental state created opportunities for young people to reengage with narratives of maturation through the accumulation of dependents, the state’s rebuilding of the city did not generate a sense of satisfaction over time. 6

Conclusion

Elizabeth Goodstein writes, Although boredom is associated with powerlessness and with an inability to act, its ascendancy comes in a world more thoroughly made by human beings than any before it. It is as though this experience without qualities, arising again and again as people confronted industrial innovations, made visible the contradiction between political impotence and a new and profound control over external nature (2005, p. 121). To some extent, Goodstein’s analysis describes the roots of the dissatisfaction experienced by Jimma residents who felt that urban growth had not brought the more meaningful change they desired. Young men struggled with a reality that did not conform to their expectations for the passage of time. They were waiting for state investments in infrastructure to touch their lives. The change would only exist if they were able to experience the benefits of urban growth personally. Young men increasingly felt that a satisfactory form of change might be forever out of reach—​or isolated to the privileged few. These young men, however, were not bored. Despite their frustration with an absence of change, I did not observe a broader discourse regarding problems concerning the passage of time. Boredom represents a very particular form of disappointment and dejection based, in part, on a particular experience of the present. Boredom requires a sense that the passage of time in the present is undifferentiated, and changes in social relationships in Ethiopia provided the critical method for assessing increments over time. During the early 2000s, unemployed young men felt they had too much time precisely because it lacked qualities of difference. When time is not differentiated, it is possible, even easy, to accumulate too much of it. As young men like Habtamu and Holyfield shifted their relationship to time in the present, experiencing the present in terms of incremental steps toward the near future, their struggles with boredom eased.

130 Mains Like in 19th-​century Europe (Goodstein, 2005), boredom in urban Ethiopia was not only the sensation of having too much time but also the sense that the experience of time is not meaningful because it does not conform to expectations of progress. However, there are different methods for measuring progress to determine if the present is qualitatively better than the past. Urban Ethiopians accurately measured progress in terms of changes in their position within social relationships. In the case of young men’s struggles with boredom, there was no sense that ‘the subject both registers and rebels against the regulation of lived, subjective time by the inhuman demands of technological progress.’ Goodstein links the emergence of boredom with romanticism and an intense desire for meaning that often valorized the experience of the individual. However, the notion of romantic individualism described by Goodstein for Western Europe was very far from the experience of unemployed youth. The replacement of “collective interpretations of experience” with “an ever greater focus on the individual, embodied self” (2005, p. 124), that Goodstein associates with modernity, did not occur in Ethiopia. Unease and frustration with an abundance of the unstructured time were based not on romantic visions of the self but on an inability to experience progress in the form of linear changes in relationships with others. For the young men in my study, boredom was the combination of undifferentiated time and an unfulfilled desire for a constructed self through social relationships. The case of bored young men in Ethiopian cities demonstrates that people often evaluate temporal change and related concepts like progress in terms of social relationships. Temporal change is embedded within specific expectations for social relationships, and, when those expectations are not met, boredom and other forms of angst often result.

Bibliography

African Business (2011). The World’s Fastest-​Growing Economy? African Business 379, pp. 57–​60. Bizuneh, G., Adino, T., Gesano, G., Guarneri, A., and Heins, F. (2001). Work Status and Unemployment in Urban Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: Central Statistical Authority. Broussar, N., and Gebrekidan Tekleselassie, T. (2012). Youth Unemployment:  Ethiopia Country Study. Working Paper no. 12/​0592. London: International Growth Centre. Central Statistical Authority (csa) (1999). The 1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: Central Statistical Authority. Donham, D. (1999). Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Economist. 2011. Africa’s Impressive Growth. Economist (6 January). Accessed 18/​09/​ 2018. http://​www.economist.com/​blogs/​dailychart/​2011/​01/​daily_​chart?page=2. Goodstein, E. (2005). Experience without Qualities:  Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guyer, J. (2007). Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time. American Ethnologist 34 (3), pp. 409–​421. doi: 10.1525/​ ae.2007.34.3.409. Hansen, K.T. (2005). Getting Stuck in the Compound: Some Odds Against Social Adulthood in Lusaka. Africa Today 51 (4), pp. 2–​17. doi: 10.1353/​at.2005.0039. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hoben, A. (1970). Social Stratification in Traditional Amhara Society. In: A. Tuden, and L. Plotnicov, eds., Social Stratification in Africa. New York: Free Press, pp. 187–​224. Jeffrey, C. (2010). Timepass:  Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jeffrey, C., Jeffery, P., and Jeffery, R. (2008). Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in North India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Koselleck, R. (1985). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge: The mit Press. Mahajan, V. (2009). Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Mains, D. (2007). Neoliberal Times:  Progress, Boredom, and Shame among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia. American Ethnologist 34 (4), pp. 659–​673. doi:  10.1525/​ ae.2007.34.4.659. Mains, D. (2012a). Blackouts and Progress:  Privatization, Infrastructure, and a Developmentalist State in Jimma, Ethiopia. Cultural Anthropology 27 (1), pp. 3–​27. doi: 10.1111/​j.1548-​1360.2012.01124.x. Mains, D. (2012b). Hope Is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Musharbash, Y. (2007). Boredom, Time, and Modernity:  An Example from Aboriginal Australia. American Anthropologist 109 (2), pp. 307–​317. doi:  10.1525/​ AA.2007.109.2.307. Radelet, S. (2010). Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way. Washington: Center for Global Development. Ralph, M. (2008). Killing Time. Social Text 26 (4), pp. 1–​29. doi: 10.1215/​01642472-​2008-​ 008. Reisberg, L., and Rumbley, L. (2010). Ethiopia: The Dilemmas of Higher Education Expansion. International Higher Education 45, pp. 23–​24. doi: 10.6017/​ihe.2010.58.8462. Schielke, S. (2008). Boredom and Despair in Rural Egypt. Contemporary Islam 2, pp. 251–​270. doi: 10.1007/​s11562-​008-​0065-​8.

132 Mains Serneels, P. (2007). The Nature of Unemployment among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia. Review of Development Economics 11 (1), pp. 170–​186. doi:  10.1111/​j.1467-​ 9361.2007.00389.x. Smith, J. (2011). Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan Ore, Temporal Dispossession, and “Movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. American Ethnologist 38 (1), pp. 17–​35. doi: 10.1111/​j.1548-​1425.2010.01289.x. Ulimwengu, J., Workneh, S., and Paulos, Z. (2009). Impact of Soaring Food Price in Ethiopia: Does Location Matter? IFPRI Discussion Paper. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute. Weiss, B. (2004). Contentious Futures: Past and present. In: B. Weiss, ed., Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age. Leiden: Brill, pp. 1–​18.

pa rt 2 Boredom and Literature

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­c hapter 6

Immersed in Boredom: the Architecture of Brisbane in Johnno Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán Abstract In Johnno (1975), David Malouf portrays Brisbane as a space of boredom. For Dante, the narrator, the city is “a place where nothing happened and where nothing would ever happen, because it had no soul,” “too mediocre even to be a province of hell.” And for Johnno, the character whose life is recounted, it is “the ugliest place in the world,” “the bloody arsehole of the universe.” Marked by World War ii, the architecture configures a sleepy sub-​tropical town, adorned with downy palm trees and hard surfaces of brown and beige weatherboard. Nevertheless, this realm of boredom—​“so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely”—​nourishes Johnno’s intellectualism and Dante’s wistfulness, providing a sense of self and place but inciting the quotidian denunciation of their surroundings and their eventual departure. Following Martin Heidegger’s suggestion to study boredom through the literary, the close analysis of the descriptions of Brisbane explores the interdependence between the condition and the architecture where it unfolds. In Johnno, far from being an environment of stasis, the capital of Queensland is a force of physical and ontological movement, with influence in the spatiality of its inhabitants. Progressing from the individual to the social and communal, boredom configures experience and thus affects actions of innovation and reactions to stagnation, as a mood—​both undesired and incantatory.

Keywords architecture –​boredom –​brisbane –​David Malouf –​Johnno –​space –​spatiality

Brisbane bears the reputation of being a place of boredom. Integral to the city, the condition does not surface as an accidental outcome of its architecture or cultural evolution. It is instead a project of identity, acknowledged and cherished by its residents and authorities. To Matthew Condon, Brisbane is “just a country town,” with “small ideas” and populated by “hicks”—​“ugly,” “boring”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_008

136 Parreño Roldán and “too slow,” designed by former Premier Peter Beattie as “a great city to bring up children” (2010, p. 168). Yet the gained stillness suffocates, promoting movement and the longing to be in another location, in a cycle of physical and emotional wandering that configures alternative realms. For Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier, a radical Brisbane has “subsisted uncomfortably beside conservative Brisbane and dull, boring Brisbane—​and mindless, hedonistic Brisbane, and smug, self-​satisfied Brisbane” (2004, p. 18). The experience of a different Brisbane relies on the capacity of subversion of the people living in the city and not on the assembly of another built environment, inducing the reconsideration of the significance of the surroundings. This ambiguity and ambivalence—​of a desired and repelled boredom, of the need to move and avoid stagnation—​is present in Johnno (1975). Regarded as a faithful and profound portrayal of the capital of Queensland during the years before and after World War ii, the first novel by David Malouf outlines the circular journeys of Dante and Johnno.1 Both are born and raised in Brisbane, influenced by its indolent and unexceptional qualities. For Dante, a sedate narrator with romantic tendencies, the settlement is a place without a soul, “where nothing happened and where nothing ever would happen,” “too mediocre even to be a province of hell,” undefeatable due to its aridity (Malouf, 1976, p.  84). Furthermore, for Johnno, whose life of conflict and agitation is recounted, the same site is “the ugliest” in the world, “the bloody arsehole of the universe,” always covered in dust and heat (Malouf, 1976, pp. 83–​84). Surrounded by immense masses of water and earth, the architecture delineates a somnolent and uniform sub-​tropical town, with wooden houses on stilts flanked by verandahs, tin roofs, metallic fences, outdoor lavatories, kitchens in the back, and the cohabitation of domestic and wild fauna and flora—​in a zone between the urban and the rural (Lynch, 1954; Craik, 1990).2 This negative space, ornamented with downy palm trees and coarse surfaces of brown and beige weatherboard, nourishes Dante’s intellectualism and Johnno’s wistfulness, marking their sense of self and belonging although impelling their denunciation of the city as a place of absence. In this domain, boredom appears as a relation of movement of two orders. It operates inside Brisbane as a pervasive mood rather than as a fleeting 1 In 2004, Johnno was selected by the Brisbane City Council as the joint winner of the One Book One Brisbane prize, which recognizes the publication that best represents Brisbane. The honor was shared with The Girl Most Likely (2003), by Rebecca Sparrow. 2 To Craik, this architecture is “the quintessential sign of Queensland […], synonymous with sub-​tropical Australia—​the outdoors and a leisurely way of life” (1990, p. 188); and to Whitlock, the Queenslander is “a bungalow on stilts” (1994, p. 76).

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sentiment, guiding the interrelation of its occupants with the environment, and therefore affecting everyday actions and responses.3 The condition also extends its varied effects by instigating discovery, as the need to circumvallate and examine its origins from the outside, testing if the motion from one position to another can lead to enlightenment. In accordance with Martin Heidegger’s affirmation that boredom is “a hybrid, partly objective, partly subjective,” and that physical movement does not entail ontological change,4 the emotional saga of Dante and Johnno is a celebration of the torpor and latency of modern Brisbane, defined by the negotiation between the specific offerings of the present and the prospect of a future of either sameness and repetition or difference and novelty (1995, pp. 87–​88; 1998, p. 190; Jose, 1985).5 1

A Dual Movement

Autobiographical in tone, the novel follows Dante’s recollection of Johnno’s life, triggered by the accidental finding of an old photograph.6 Mediating and silently witnessing their relationship, the architectural characteristics of Brisbane turn into nodes of orientation that direct and predispose. The covered openness of the residential verandahs, buildings with facades of pastel-​ colored metal slats and sloping timber panels to deflect rain, the exuberance of nature in the parklands, the extinct tramways and the Brisbane River all choreograph and complicate the experience of the protagonists. To Malouf, unlike a stationary scenography, the dynamic presence of the city in the novel allows the reader to enter its space “as if he were returning to the place he had grown up in, and whose weather, light, architecture, and verbal habits and

3 In agreement with philosophical elaborations, neuroscience classifies boredom as a mood rather than as feeling (Damasio, 2003). 4 Heidegger explains that “when movedness is taken as change of place, there is a corresponding kind of rest, namely, remaining in the same place. But something that continues to occupy the same place and thus is not moved in the sense of change of place, can nonetheless be in a process of movedness. For example, a plant that is rooted ‘in place’ grows (increases) or withers (decreases). And conversely, something that moves insofar as it changes its place can still ‘rest’ by remaining as it was constituted” (1998, p. 190). 5 For Jose, Johnno “is a celebration of failure and an elegy for those sleepy, carefree, dreaming Australian values that could not survive. With the burden of doom characteristic of much Australian writing, its heart sides with what progress and prosperity annihilate” (1985, p. 327). 6 Malouf confesses, “it was a book that was written out of guilt, as an attempt to come to terms with the extent to which I was not responsible but involved in the death it described” (Levasseur, Rabalais, and Malouf, 2002, p. 166).

138 Parreño Roldán social tensions had shaped him” (2000, pp. 701–​702).7 However, in Brisbane, the only permanence is a state of suspension where nothing stands out. The omnipresent featurelessness conforms an immense shanty-​town, limitless and emplaced nowhere, an iteration of the many ghost-​towns in the northern coast that suffered the cycle of growth and decline, eventually becoming deserted—​“the houses one morning simply lifted down from their stumps, loaded on to the back of a lorry” (Malouf, 1976, pp.  83–​84). With the same apathy reigning across the continent, the serial construction of almost identical units of habitation gives the appearance of egalitarianism, although maintaining individuality due to their physical detachment and the freedom lived in their interior. Impervious to the ideological connotations of architectural and spatial expansion as a mode of colonization, Dante and Johnno react differently to this regularity. For the staid and cerebral Dante, the attraction to Brisbane saves him by becoming an obsessive theme of reflection, objectifying the city, and so enabling its understanding and final absolution. And for the unruly and intuitive Johnno, the repulsion to the capital annihilates him by overpowering his capacity to engage with any other reality, obfuscating perception, and causing impassiveness. To both, Brisbane—​lived as boredom—​is an enduring condition that moves from the space of sentiments and thoughts to the space of the body and the material environment.8 This flow connects and modifies, acting topologically as a structural thread. If pulled from the surface, then it can reconfigure what lies in profundity, generating self-awareneess through the revision of the outside. If tugged from the inside, what remains in the exterior can change, altering relations and raising the possibility of involvement. In a cycle of emotional and rational melding, the spiral trajectory of boredom is paradoxical. It not only departs from one place to denote the existence of 7 To the author, Johnno “was about growing up in my hometown, Brisbane, a place that for some reason had never till then got itself into a book—​or not anyway in a form that had brought it alive in people’s minds and stuck. I wanted to put it on the map; to make it, in all its particularity, a place that would exist powerfully in the lives of readers in the same way that Dickens’s London does, or Dostoevsky’s Petersburg” (Malouf, 2000, pp. 701–​702). 8 Malouf acknowledges that his work “is best understood spatially rather than chronologically. I think this is true of a lot of writing, and music, too.” Also, to him, the act of writing connects the interior and exterior of an individual: “I think of writing as public dreaming. Maybe that’s how the interior and exterior are related. We all find a shared language in the area of dreams. There’s a good deal of ‘dream stuff’ in what I write. When the narrative in one of my books needs to open itself up or find a new way forward, it does so by going further inside. It’s dreaming that allows the narration to break out into a shared, a public world. There is something paradoxical in that, but it’s where I think the balance occurs at least for me” (Levasseur et al., 2002, pp. 168, 172).

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another, expressing something beyond its identification and utterance, but also demands the accelerated progression of time, albeit its passing seems to have been delayed, provoking confusion and deficit of meaning.9 1.1 Inside Brisbane In Dante, the boredom of Brisbane morphs into calm introspection. His recollection of Johnno’s life and death begin with the passing of his father, as the need to comprehend the transition from one realm to another. Contrary to Johnno, Dante inhabits interiority, not in creative imagination or arid abstraction but in a relentless process of decoding the phenomena of his surroundings.10 Called “The Professor” before being nicknamed “Dante” by Johnno, after the publication in the school magazine of a poem “To Beatrice,” his existence gives the impression of being minimal in the outside world—​his real name is not revealed and his physical qualities are not conveyed. Consciously opting to remain in the periphery, this disembodied figure lacks reverberation. During his childhood, he never belonged to any circle of friends and was happiest in the recognizable limits of the family house, reading Alexandre Dumas and daydreaming about those “marvellous Olden Days when people wore satin and spoke French and when everything that happened was History” (Malouf, 1976, p. 20). Consonant with the simple language and linear structure of the novel, Dante’s elucubrations simultaneously compose and recreate a space of alienation and detachment, a retort to the boredom of Brisbane that projects a personal worldview.11 To himself, this was a problematic result of his personal and academic idealism, always refusing to get involved by imposing emotional distance, and so living as if removed from the indeterminacy of romanticism and literature despite his attraction to both.12

9

10

11 12

Heidegger identifies three typologies of boredom: “becoming bored by something,” “being bored with something,” and “it is boring for one.” The third is the most profound and can lead to “moments of vision,” during which “one feels timeless, one feels removed from the flow of time” (1995, pp. 141, 116–​117, 175). Malouf affirms that “imagination doesn’t mean making things up; it means being able to understand things from the inside, emotions, events, and experiences that you haven’t actually been through but that you will have experienced by the time you’ve got them onto the page. Through the imagination, you hit on things that are more real than the facts-​emotions that can be hidden by the facts” (Levasseur et al., 2002, p. 169). For Byron, Dante “enacts a paradox: to translate a worldview into another language or idiom is to diminish or to negate it, and so it must be imagined, imperfectly” (2005, p. 88). According to Nettlebeck, “an aesthetic of romanticism is often invoked in Malouf’s work and functions symbolically, it seems, to put to rest that very colonial history of violence and exclusion; to move beyond a culture of division and to gesture towards tolerance

140 Parreño Roldán In between too much irony and too much common sense, Dante perceives Brisbane as the unit of a progressive condition of sameness. Australia constitutes the largest vessel of irredeemable boredom, without a prominent role in World War ii and without events worth being recorded. The continent is a sucession of unremarkable days, rhythmically outlined by the recurrence of the weather and the fondness of the population for social traditions of equal irrelevance. Since nothing extraordinary transpires, the smallest variation of the daily routine turns into news, exaggerated and fictionalized, as when a turtle stranded in a nearby beach was thought to be a war device, Singapore surrendered and the menace of invasion loomed, and a petrol tank was thought to be a spying Japanese submarine. In this scalar arrangement, Queensland is one of many medium territories. To Dante, its designation as the Moonshine State is humorous due to its generality. Nothing could be said about it, not only because it does not have any salient qualities but also because it is trapped in a bygone era—​“half of it is still wild (there are tigers as yet undiscovered in the Cape York Peninsula according to some authorities), the rest detained in a sort of perpetual nineteenth century” (Malouf, 1976, p. 21). Accordingly, Brisbane is a replaceable component, identical to other small settlements, uninspired and uninspiring as well as unloving and unlovable. Mirroring his experience of the city to another of the past, transporting himself to a different temporality and adopting a referential persona, Dante contrasts his indifference to the fixation of Dante Alighieri with Florence in the 13th century, which filled the poet’s life and informed his writing. Fearful of the ordinariness of Brisbane, he questions the consequences of being shaped by a place without poetry or anything of artistic attention, posing the vulgarity and banality of women selling home-​ made goods and farmers offering animals on Queen Street as inferior to the aesthetics canonized by museums and cultural institutions. In this space of concrete abstraction—​“so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely!”—​time is slowed, giving rise to the uncanny and the quest to find a home (Malouf, 1976, p. 21). If boredom constitutes a symptom of homesickness and the feeling of being out of the world, Brisbane is then the place of home for Dante but lived in estrangement.13 The city fails to provide a significant here or there, being instead a moment of transition, an unplanned stop in the journey from one place to another—​“Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears in my schoolbooks. But

13

and reconciliation. What that aesthetic obscures, however, is that its apparently apolitical impulse is still bound to the very traditions it wants to review” (1994, pp. 103–​104). As Heidegger observes, “to be at home everywhere means to be at once and at all times within the whole” (1995, p. 5).

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what does it mean? Where do I really stand?” (Malouf, 1976, p. 49). Different to his peers who left after university, taking jobs in other states or traveling overseas to study or seek adventure, Dante stayed, sinking into a deep despondency that turned into boredom. He sttubornly lingered in Brisbane, with the illusion of attaining existential validation. During the working days, since his mood required the affirming company of a mantra of labor, the repetitive procedures of his everyday life as a statistics clerk turned into a method of research designed to understand what is home through the abiding in the familiar, where the terms of engagement are known and deviations from the norm are not permitted. And during the weekends, to delve into the common without the false glamour of other countries, Dante rode his bike to the coast and meandered along the Hamilton pier at night, seeking to be attuned with the monotony of the environment. Ignoring this yearning, Brisbane denied any knowledge to Dante. The city shriveled, with firmness, all prospects of enlightening, bestowing emptiness instead of fullness. Resembling a negative container of varying and unstable form, the boredom of the city eluded reason and consumed all the inner resources he had been collecting. The only offering it granted was the conclusion that all his ambitions had vanished, leaving him immersed in limbo, without a body or context but regulated by both, in desynchronization and suspended movement.14 With an architecture organized to procure undemanding and comfortable habits, the capital performed as an emotional vacuum that did not cause suffering but incited internal stasis. Rather than being an inexorable destiny, the inhabitation in this realm was a deliberate choice that liberated Dante from the risk of being a victim—​“two years drifted by, in which I learned nothing, it seemed and certainly achieved nothing. I had five jobs, two serious near-​misses on the motorbike, and was twenty-​three. […] I was simply immobilized from within” (Malouf, 1976, p. 110). To assess if the boredom of Brisbane was the cause of his boredom, ­Dante traveled to Europe, visiting Johnno in France, before moving to England, intrigued by the effects of settling in a different city. Nonetheless, nothing exotic was extended to him, and another routine followed. He taught from Monday to Friday, drank at the Carnarvon Castle or the Queens, shopped on Saturdays, and walked to the top of Bidston Hill on Sundays, week after week. As though Brisbane had never left him, or he had never left anywhere, this lifestyle of

14

To Heidegger, “being held in limbo” and “being left empty” are the two structural moments of all the variations of boredom (1995, pp. 86–​87).

142 Parreño Roldán regular rhythm was an internalized conduct, structuring an essential way of being. The memories of Brisbane and its boredom persevered, as a measure of comparison with other locations and as an object of nostalgic reflection—​ although being aware of the imminent transformation of his city (Malouf, 1976, pp. 127–​128): the Brisbane I knew was already changing (my mother’s letters kept me informed of old places torn down and of new ones emerging, the Grand Central replaced by a shopping arcade, a whole block in front of the Town Hall ploughed up to make a parking station, the old markets cleared out of the city into a distant suburb, new bridges, new highways); […] It was the town I would always walk in, in my memory at least, with an assurance I could know nowhere else, […] I could have made my way through it blindfold, as I often did in my sleep, amazed to discover that in my Brisbane the old markets hadn’t been removed at all, and the Grand Central, that extraordinary three-​ring circus of my youth, was still in full swing. I  could see my own reflections in its mirrors. And Johnno’s as well. It would always be there. 1.2 Out of Brisbane In Johnno, the boredom of Brisbane manifests as eccentric extrospection. In the image that initiates Dante’s account, he displays a “big, lopsided grin” and “Cagney-​style middle parting and brilliantine waves,” wearing “round gold-​rimmed glasses that might have belonged to his grandmother” (Malouf, 1976, p.  10). As an overconfident schoolboy, only concerned with diverting others as a way to relish himself, his charisma stemmed from the deliberate assembly of unpredictable provocations, embodying an alter persona on every occasion. The forms adopted to amuse, systematic and calculated as well as impulsive and arbitrary, insinuate to the exterior the configurations of his interior. Even though this consistent recklessness provides stimuli to others, as a center of attention and distraction, it does not intend to please because it involves danger and hostility. Without residues of innocence, his actions and enactments identify boundaries only to infringe them—​“he would do anything […] he had no sense of responsibility, no school spirit, no loyalty to his country or to his House, no respect for anything”—​unveiling his refusal to any opportunity for engagement—​“Johnno cared for nothing and nobody. No crime was beyond him […]. We were appalled and delighted by him” (Malouf, 1976, pp. 15, 16). As a result of his intolerance to idle restlessness and restless idleness, Johnno’s misdemeanors battled the boredom of Brisbane, persisting throughout

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his life.15 As a child, he was a precocious leader with a crowd that imitated and supported his behavior—​for instance, with the help of another boy whose father was a bookmaker, he ran a profitable black market with hired accomplices to beat those who were behind in their payments, and, at Cadet Camp, he organized “ ‘sessions’ in the showers at which he wins over three pounds by being able to come faster and further and more often than any other boy in his platoon” (Malouf, 1976, p. 15). Called “a clown,” “a ratbag” and “an anti-​social,” always threatened with expulsion from school, he shoplifted and was guilty of other minor incidents of vandalism. As an adolescent, Johnno became a golden boy, cool and collected, immune to the many curiosities of his friends. This satiety organized a concatenation of intrepid activities that peaked on Friday night. Accompanied by Dante, after drinking illegally at the Grand Central and meandering through its rooms—​a queer bar, a ladies lounge and an open-​air beer garden, known as “the Sex Pit”—​he visited the brothels, which were hidden behind tall walls of corrugated iron, with the same architecture as most houses in the neighborhood. The excitement of being in a public domesticity of labyrinthine spaces, where he was not supposed to be, characterized these calls. Johnno made everyone laugh and caused unfounded brawls with loud yells, ruthless expletives and ominous body gestures, as a burst of emotions that prompted a furious run through the streets of Brisbane when the owner picked the phone to call the police. With the same intensity, Johnno investigated official religions and unconfirmed cults for the search for purification, considered conspiracy theories that explained the monotony of the capitalist system, and even fell in love to experience the conformist delusions of the middle classes. As an adult, contrary to Dante’s determined decision to stay in Brisbane, Johnno moved to the Congo when he finished studying geology—​identifying layers, from the surface to the core. Before beginning the great escape that assured absolute freedom, he raged against the city and Australia, promising 15

Johnno’s behavior is aligned with psychological and sociological studies that describe the negative effects of boredom. When the condition does not derive into creativity, then it becomes an impairment that fuels the quest for the excessive and extreme. Boredom can surface as depression and anxiety, aggressive behavior, emotional and intellectual instability, lack of concentration, poor social relationships, lower life satisfaction, drug and alcohol abuse, eating and sexual disorders, gambling and proneness to crime. The literature in psychology that covers these manifestations is extensive and recent. See, for example, LePera, “Relationships between Boredom Proneness, Mindfulness, Anxiety, Depression, and Substance Use” (2011); Goldberg et al. “Boredom: An Emotional Experience Distinct from Apathy, Anhedonia, or Depression” (2011); and Dahlen et al. “Boredom Proneness in Anger and Aggression: Effects of Impulsiveness and Sensation Seeking” (2004).

144 Parreño Roldán “to shit this bitch of a country right out of my system. […] And at the end of seven years I’ll have squeezed the whole fucking continent out through my arsehole” (Malouf, 1976, p. 98). Johnno wanted a complete transmutation, with a renewed body and a different façade, in a process of metamorphosis that would entail cleansing. This organic renovation required separation from Brisbane, restricting himself to a state of permanent movement that led to a bohemian period in Europe. Nevertheless, despite the dissimilarity of Budapest, Hamburg and Vienna, the same deceivingly erratic behavior of Brisbane developed.16 In a circular fluctuation from euphoria to wrath, Johnno continued to frequent bars and red-​light districts and engage in crimes against property, conducting extensive operations to steal and dismantle luxury cars to sell their parts in illegitimate markets. He even burned churches with intended blasphemy, as if the architecture would be the most authentic representation of their misleading dogmas—​“four Methodist, one Congregational, one Anglican, and one of some other nondescript nonconformist creed […]. The Catholics had escaped because the bastards always built in stone!” (­Malouf, 1976, p. 136). Attendant to this sequence of enchantment and regret with every destination, Johnno’s corporeality changed. In Paris, he looked fragile, with “a fine gold moustache growing downwards towards the jaw” that emphasized “his hollow cheeks and large eyes,” dissimilar to “the big, raw-​boned Johnno, all angles and impatience” of Brisbane (Malouf, 1976, p. 114). In Athens, he had “filled out and was almost plump,” cleanly shaven, with longer hair and dulled eyes, “as though he had begun to realize in the flesh of his own larger possibilities, and was growing to fill them” (Malouf, 1976, p. 131). And at his final arrival in Australia, he was not only “enormous” and “larger than life” but also “gross, disheveled, his flesh flabby and yellow behind the miner’s beard,” imposing distance to cushion himself from any external presences (Malouf, 1976, p. 134). To Dante, these incarnations were expressions of a process of release but also of repression, in pursuit of his soul and a definite body capable of fitting within the surroundings. While Johnno’s violence turned into cases of public disorder, as surges of aggression that materialized his being in the world, his incapacity to sustain relationships signaled to his discomfort, as the failure to acknowledge his desires. The boredom of Brisbane remained as a funnel that permitted the flow of emotion, never settling

16

Johnno’s traveling resonates with Malouf’s affirmation that there is no need “for a writer to root himself in a particular world: the geography of one’s place lives where it is internalized, as the geography of one’s individuality that can go anywhere” (Jose, 1985, p. 326).

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but always consuming—​in his last meeting with Dante, he seemed preoccupied, being maudlin, abusive and weary, incapable of entertaining and being entertained. 1.3 Changed Brisbane When returning, after having visited Johnno in Athens, Dante finds that Brisbane had remained unchanged, notwithstanding its architecture was undergoing a process of modernization. The encounter with this reality of different sameness questioned his recollection of the city as a place of freedom, confirming the omnipresence of boredom but detecting a new variation of the condition.17 Unlike the significant monotony of the customs of the past—​“in the evening the lamp had to be pumped” and “in the morning there was water to be fetched, in a kerosene tin, from the tank at the top of the hill,” and in between “nothing extraordinary happened”—​the busyness of the construction of the future entailed meaningless promises of progress, perpetuating wistful phantasmagoria (Malouf, 1976, p. 21). The old boathouses where dances were held, the pontoons that saved people from floods, and the discreet brothels of love and bellicosity, among many other structures, had been dismantled and only a few had been relocated. The new equivalents, ​with fresh membranes of transparent glass and flat iron that contrasted with the opaqueness of wood and texturized weatherboards, ​impeded the re-​enactment of a bygone era, questioning if the change in the architecture was the cause of a truncated connection with the environment, or if the interior stillness of Dante and Johnno was incapable of assembling the necessary systems of

17

Similarly, in “Notes on the New Town” (1995), Lefebvre distinguishes two types of boredom according to the historical development of Navarrenx, a medieval town, and Mourenx, a post-​war settlement. The first type belongs exclusively to Navarrenx, always boring due to its idleness and slow pace, “vegetating and emptying.” This boredom is pre-​ modern, “soft and cosy […] like Sundays with the family, comforting and carefree […] life was lived there.” The second type is modern, present in both towns. In Navarrenx, the incessant construction of the new and the selective preservation of the old had turned the city into a wasteland, invaded by cars, lorries and industrial noise. This moment “is just boring, the pure essence of boredom.” In Mourenx, everything is new and functional. State capitalism had succeeded in its efforts to provide “well planned and properly built” tower blocks—​“machines for living in.” However, in the new town, “everything is almost a hundred percent redundant,” easy to comprehend—​“the text of the town is totally legible, as impoverished as it is clear, despite the architects’ efforts to vary the lines.” The clarity and hermetic resolution of the techno-​architecture of Mourenx mark the triumph of material development, but expose, at the same time, the modern built environment as a space devoid of naturalness (pp. 117–​119).

146 Parreño Roldán orientation—​as when both lastly reunited in their natal place (Malouf, 1976, p. 147): If Johnno had intended us somehow to revive the exploits of our youth, Brisbane itself had taken measures to prevent us. The Greek Club had been moved back a street towards the Gardens, and we took a good twenty minutes to convince ourselves that we weren’t dreaming when it refused to reveal itself in the old place. The new club had an open courtyard and a regular restaurant and looked eminently respectable. The brothels too were gone—​closed by the new government as part of a campaign to destroy the city’s reputation as a tropical backwater, sluggish, colonial, degenerate, and force it into the present. At an urban scale, the demolition of structures that seemed defective or no longer emblematic created voids that responded to an overall plan, with whole blocks excavated to make carparks and recreational areas covered in concrete and potted palms, redefining public spaces—​even Victoria Bridge was at risk as it was deemed unsafe, with a substitute being designed to sit 50 yards upstream. Moreover, freeways along both banks of the river imposed new borders, producing mechanical noise and acidic smog, and thus eliminating the unrehearsed sounds and the sweet stench of the mangroves. Unlike the entropic negotiations of nature, the clearly outlined functions of modern infrastructure required arid processes of construction, with technological equipment capable of moving high volumes of earth and dirt, composing a vast cityscape of cranes, hooks and chains. Regardless of this newness, Brisbane—​in the process of becoming a minor metropolis, outlined by the quiet regulations of advancement—​retained the aspirations of previous generations. To Dante, disbelieving that old codes of sociability had survived the urban transmutation, the ghosts of the schoolboys of his childhood were still visible behind the stable and dull presence of the adults he ran into on Queen Street or Hamilton. His contemporaries had become “lawyers, stockbrokers with seats on the Exchange, architects, accountants, successful real-​estate agents,” working to acquire trophies of success,​ “scrubbed colonial furniture, the pennants for swimming and football in the children’s rumpus room, a Blackman lithograph” (Malouf, 1976, pp. 144, 145). Although untouched, the traditions turned unrecognizable since those who embraced them acted like playful children pretending to be serious adults, or like aging infants unwilling to grow up—​as self-​centered individuals rather than as a community responding to a unifying mythology. When among these

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characters, Johnno—​impersonating a tourist, in safari clothes—​reappeared to Dante in the new Brisbane, not only the past refused to become present but also the present refused to become significant. Via the Congo, Paris, London, Hamburg and Athens, he had completed a cycle of physical traveling, only to return to the point of departure to evaluate his change through the rediscovery of Brisbane. Failing to provide personal resolution or a sense of belonging, the process of repatriation surfaced as profound boredom.18 To Johnno, the old Brisbane was a container of familiar references, a space of permanent expectancy, but the new Brisbane constituted a flat horizon of alienation, a space of deterministic saturation.19 Suspected by Dante to be suicide, The Courier-​Mail reported his death with the headline “Accidental drowning near Miles” (Malouf, 1976, p. 152).20 The incapacity to stay afloat in the city resulted in a fatal submersion, as if the Australia that Johnno wanted to expel ultimately consumed him (Malouf, 1976, p. 152): And it was Johnno who was gone. Australia was till these, more loud-​ mouthed, prosperous, intractable than ever. Far from being destroyed, the Myth was booming. […] Real estate was pushing deeper into the gullies, higher towards the crest of every visible hill. New fast highways ribbons across the country, with service stations all steel-​and-​glass, motels and glass-​and-​polished-​wood, identical from Cairns to Albany. […] In the old city centers slim tower-​blocks were staggering toward the moon like grounded rockets aimed at nowhere, vying perhaps with the figures, forever climbing, of the Stock Exchange, where oil and mineral stocks were reaching astronomical heights, and index of Australia’s extraordinary confidence in its own future.

18

19 20

As Malouf reflects, “there’s a sense, even among Australians, that it has always been the other place—​the other place that we’re trying to bring ourselves home to. Australians recognize in my books an attempt to finally settle the place. The physical settling has already happened, of course, but there is another settling that has to take place in an interior way, spiritual and symbolic” (Levasseur et al., 2002, p. 172). To Malouf, “there are no pre-​existing spaces, no pre-​existing stages: what we have to do is make the space itself” (Carter and Malouf, 1989). Saint Thomas posed acedia, ​a medieval predecessor of modern boredom, ​as a profound despair that can result in suicide, since it constitutes a final disregard of the self and the perception of the world as a realm of inescapable and meaningless sameness (2006, Q. 35, Art. 3).

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Moving Boredom

For Heidegger, boredom is a condition of movement.21 It encloses the sufferer as a force that propels motion, from an external and internal position to another. In Dante and Johnno, this process prompts practices of traveling that gyrate around a particular location, forcing the return to the origin and thereby causing dizziness—​the ideal condition to question the assumed stability of the world. By opposing a linear ascension, the confrontation of boredom with the surroundings echoes the essence of being human, which can only be understood in relation to the surrounding architecture and through the identification of home as what stays unmoved during the oscillation from one emotional circumstance to another. Like in the Brisbane portrayed by Malouf, boredom is marked by absence and undesirability, a negation to the environment that structures efforts to escape. Evident in the modern everyday life and its superficial actions to pass the time, the sense of deficiency cannot be annihilated—​to Heidegger, “we ‘know’ […] that boredom can return at any time. […] This does not at all mean that we do not wish to be conscious of it, but rather that we do not wish to let it be awake” (1995, p. 78). This avoidance articulates and provides a sense of place and spatiality. In Johnno, far from being a cognitive disposition, boredom consolidates a personal architecture that a­ ccompanies the protagonists’ individuality. It captures their attention, ­either to the inside—​for the grave narrator—​or the outside—​for his recalcitrant subject of ­observation.22 The city, filtering interiority and eexteerioority, turns into  a  cartography of experience and identity (Carter and Malouf, 1989, p. 97):

21

22

Despite the ubiquitous elaborations on boredom, which began to appear in the early 20th century, Martin Heidegger’s philosophical account is considered the most detailed and best structured. It was extensively developed in a seminar series at the University of Freiburg, in the winter of 1929–​1930, and published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Goodstein describes it as “an existential grammar of a mood” (2005, p. 282). Unlike a cognitive state, boredom cannot be designed, imposed or eliminated through concentrated effort. Writing about Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger affirms that “the will can appeal to ways and means for suppressing the bad mood, but it cannot directly awaken or create a countermood: for moods are overcome and transformed always only by moods. […] Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. […] Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside ourselves” (1979, p. 99, quoted in Thiele, 1997, p. 498).

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[T]‌he way people orientate themselves geographically, the way they move through a landscape, which you call their geographical intuition, is as unique as any other characteristic, and it may be that aspect of exploration that allows us into their characters. Eventually collapsing in Johnno, but succeeding in Dante, the boredom of Brisbane enables the mapping and reassessment of the capital in its most basic state, indifferently and in contradiction, as a space of immersion with a diffuse center of gravity. The architecture loses its historical and aesthetical qualities to become neutral and devoid of meaning, but with the capacity to defy the architecture of any other place, disregarding prejudices and judgments of formal and cultural value. Consonant with Dante’s numerous plans to visit other parts of the world—​including Sweden, Spain and Nepal, centers of civilization, amusement and faith—​the desire to be in an alternate realm demands its ideation. The resultant agitation fuels fantasies of finding, designing and building a space of belonging, since the concern with ‘how to exist’ necessarily incorporates ‘where to exist’ (Emad, 1985). In the novel, the reigning boredom questions the modern understanding of the world as mundus, problematizing inhabitation as a circumstance of interior and exterior interrelation, predominantly in conflict—​as Dante’s and Johnno’s school headmaster warned with severity, “the World […] is what we are about to be tested against” (Malouf, 1976, p. 53; see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1  Brisbane from the air, December 1957 (Queensland State Archives. Item ID436402, Photographic material, 2609x1665). Public domain.

150 Parreño Roldán

Bibliography

Byron, M. (2005). Crossing Borders of the Self in the Fiction of David Malouf. Sydney Studies in English 31, pp. 77–​94. Carter, P., and Malouf, D. (1989). Space, Writing and Historical Identity. Thesis Eleven 22, pp. 92–​105. Condon, M. (2010). Brisbane. Sydney: unsw Press. Craik, J. (1990). The Cultural Politics of the Queensland House. Continuum 3 (1), pp. 188–​213. doi: 10.1080/​10304319009388157. Dahlen, E., Martin, R., Ragan, K., and Kuhlman, M. (2004). Boredom Proneness in Anger and Aggression: Effects of Impulsiveness and Sensation Seeking. Personality and Individual Differences 37 (8), pp. 1615–​1627. doi: 10.1016/​j.paid.2004.02.016. Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza:  Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt. Emad, P. (1985). Boredom as Limit and Disposition. Heidegger Studies 1 (1), pp. 63–​78. doi: 0.5840/​heideggerstud198516. Evans, R., and Ferrier, C. (2004). Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History. Melbourne: Vulgar Press. Goldberg, Y., Eastwood, J., LaGuardia, J., and Danckert, J. (2011). Boredom: An Emotional Experience Distinct from Apathy, Anhedonia, or Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 30 (6), pp. 647–​66. doi: 10.1521/​jscp.2011.30.6.647. Goodstein, E. (2005). Experience without Qualities:  Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1979). Nietzsche, Volume 1:  The Will to Power as Art. Translated by D. Krell. New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998). On the Essence and Concept of Φυσισ in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1. In: W. McNeill, ed., Pathmarks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 183–​230. Jose, N. (1985). Cultural Identity:  “I Think I’m Something Else.” Daedalus 114 (1), pp. 311–​342. Lefebvre, H. (1995). Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes. London: Verso. LePera, N. (2011). Relationships between Boredom Proneness, Mindfulness, Anxiety, Depression, and Substance Use. New School Psychology Bulletin 8, pp. 15–​25. Levasseur, J., Rabalair, K., and Malouf, D. (2002). Public Dreaming. An Interview with David Malouf. The Kenyon Review 24 (3/​4), pp. 164–​173. Lynch, K. (1954). Some Aspects of Domestic Architecture in Queensland. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 5 (3), pp. 1076–​1086. Malouf, D. (1976). Johnno. Victoria: Penguin Books Australia.

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Malouf, D. (2000). A Writing Life: The 2000 Neustadt Lecture. World Literature Today 74 (4), pp. 701–​705. doi: 10.2307/​40156066. Nettlebeck, A. (1994). Rewriting an Explorer Mythology: The Narration of Space in David Malouf’s Work. In: Provisional Maps: Critical Essays on David Malouf. Perth: University of Western Australia, pp. 101–​115. Saint Thomas (2006). Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae. The Gutenberg Project. Accessed 08/​04/​2018. http://​www.gutenberg.org/​ebooks/​18755. Thiele, L. (1997). Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology. Polity 29 (4), pp. 489–​517. doi: 10.2307/​3235265. Whitlock, G. (1994). The Child in the (Queensland) House: David Malouf and Regional Writing. In:  A. Nettlebeck, ed., Provisional Maps:  Critical Essays on David Malouf. Perth: University of Western Australia, pp. 71–​84.

­c hapter 7

The Presence of Literature: Georg Büchner’s Comedy Leonce und Lena Wolfram Malte Fues Abstract First impression: a brilliant copy of the romantic comedy. Second impression: a decisive critique of absolutism after the Napoleonic Wars. An analysis of this two impressions shows that Büchner’s text Leonce und Lena parodies the romantic irony and deconstructs the categories necessary for political and aesthetical criticism based on the principles of the ‘Weimarer Klassik:’ presence, identity, the logic of systems in hierarchy, and stability of meanings by unbroken mediation in history and society. The result:  the disintegration of traditional plots, figures, characters, opinions, and perspectives; all of this leading to a consequence of shifting, confusion, tiredness, and, last but not least, boredom.

Keywords boredom –​ literature –​ Modernity –​ poetry –​ romantic comedy

‘Among the Germans, maybe only Grabbe and Büchner have […] been able to write comedy. However, whoever understands its humor hears a rumbling in their ears close to pain … And, in case they laugh, they laugh at themselves, at the sarcastic sphinx that accompanies them in their vital excursion.’1 Humor, in Georg Büchner’s Leonce und Lena [Leonce and Lena] comedy, comes from

1 That was said by the unknown critic under the pseudonym of ‘Wolfram,’ in a paper entitled „Das deutsche Lustspiel“ and published in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur und Mode (1848, pp. 30–​31, quoted in Hauschild, 1985, p. 205). See also Martin (2014). This chapter was translated by Prof. Dr. Roberto Navarrete Alonso (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain) and Prof. Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco (Harvard University, MA)—​the latter also edited the chapter. When no English edition was available for some quotes, the translation was done by ourselves according to the German edition the author used.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_009

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the inclination of the characters to ask unanswerable questions that are so precisely since their response is inherent in the question itself, as in a trick. In his fable, the creatures [Wesen] engage in excesses [Unwesen] that make the audience to ask questions themselves that are not only difficult to answer but already answered. Moreover, whoever threads himself to this answer, spins around his text as if it were his nose, and laughs only at himself—​at his vital excursion, as necessary as absurd. The questions one cannot answer without being offended are innocuous as long as we acknowledge they are incomprehensible. Thus, the critic A … G …, in the Vossiche Zeitung edition on 27th June 1880, talks—​bemoaning—​about the “incomprehensible comedy Leonce und Lena” (Wolfram, 1848, quoted in Hauschild, 1985, p.  251). It is also difficult to understand that, in Leonce und Lena, the author of Danton and Woyzeck suffers from “a descent into simple literary comedy according to the Shakespeare’s model” (Gundolf, 1969, p. 93). In such a case, literature will be just a resolved subterfuge—​the incidental shape of one another different shape that provokes and conceals the former as soon as it shaves it. “Leonce und Lena is a parody that only occasionally and suddenly turns into an obvious satire. […] The parody aims to be a romantic-​idealistic comedy and the absolutism” (Knapp, 1984, p. 109). In order to understand Leonce und Lena, it is critical “that the free game, devoid of goals, which is carried out by the characters of the piece, stages in such a way that betrays itself” (Poschmann, 1981, p. 116), according to a goal that exceeds and turns it into its mean—​the parody of “the supposedly illustrated and modern system of the derisory absolutism” (1981, p.  122). The game between ‘literature’ and ‘literature’ points toward an extraliterary subject. It reaches its goal since it is exaggerated and overinterpreted by multiple insinuations—​because it parodies a kind of literature that already aims this topic: “it should not be forgotten that” Leonce und Lena’s “ultimate aim is to undermine the bourgeois theater convention integrated into the court, or the courtly theater open to the bourgeoisie, as well as the really distorted idealized image of the society that is represented in it” (1981, p. 129). Leonce und Lena parodies the romantic-​idealistic comedy and, therefore, the absolutism.2 However, this comedy—​e.g., Die verkehrte Welt [The Inverted World], Der gestiefelte Kater [Puss in Boots], or Prinz Zerbino [Prince Zerbino], 2 ‘Liberals’ and ‘materialists’ agree that Leonce und Lena parodies the romantic-​idealistic comedy despite their discrepancies about the consequences. For that reason, we selected the abovementioned statement as a starting point for our question about how the piece was previously understood (see Hermand, 1983, p. 104 ff.).

154 Fues by Tieck—​is ironic about the same derisory illustrated absolutism that supposedly is parodying Leonce und Lena. The parody that Poschmann and Knapp acknowledge in Büchner’s piece, thus, parodies an irony. Is this possible? How is it possible that a complete essence may manifest itself in a temporary and, as such, deficient phenomenon? Because the beauty will be in the fact that everything has been felt as obscure and, for that reason, it has tried to unite the most contradictory things. The solution is in acting correctly, resolutely: that is art. It only appears when the idea or the essence is in the place of the practical reality, and, precisely because of that, the real-​effective itself, the simple phenomenon, is deleted. This is the point of view of irony (Raumer and Tieck, 1973, p. 360).3 The perfect act following this art only happens when the author deletes the practical reality like a simple phenomenon; that is to say, it is the annihilation. It makes the practical reality prevails entirely present, fundamentally pure, against that one of the sensible phenomena, always incomplete, that develops itself continuously—​the real revelation of the real-​effective [des Wirklichen] shifts the disappointing pretenses of the reality [des Realen]. Art designates and consummates a double act to decompose and replace a phenomenic context by an essence—​not in its concept, like in philosophy, but its idea: in the simple appearance of its to-​appear-​the-​one-​in-​the-​other [Aneinder-​Er-​ Scheinens]. That is the idealistic point of view defined by the German classicism in Schiller’s aesthetical theory (2015, pp. 34–​35): To arrange fantastic portraits in an arbitrary sequence does not mean entering into the ideal, and to present reality imitatively does not signify a representation of nature. These two requirements are so little in contradiction with each other that they are, instead, the same: art is for that reason true, that it completely takes leave of reality and becomes purely ideal. Nature herself is only an idea of the mind, which never impinges upon the senses. She lies beneath the blanket of appearances, but never appears herself. It is granted alone to the art of the ideal, or actually, it is her mission, to grasp this mind of the universe, and bind it to a corporeal form. […] It follows, self-​evidently, that the artist can use no single element of reality as he finds it, that his work must be ideal

3 Letter from K.W.F. Solger, a friend of Ludwig Tieck, to his brother Friedrich, June 11, 1815. On Solger’s concept of irony, see Dannenhauer (1988).

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in all of its parts if it is to have reality as a whole and be in agreement with nature. Where is the irony there? Nature, according to Schiller—​the practical reality in its simple and necessary determinism [Bestimmheit]—​is an idea of the real spirit that is not given to the senses as to the phenomena; it is hidden under its cover. Consequently, the objective decomposes in an ambiguous antagonism, in which the phenomenon hides the idea and makes it imperceptible, while the idea is felt precisely in such a perceptible cover of the imperceptible. If we go back to the beginnings of the modern concept of idea—​and, as Descartes did, we “call “idea” everything in our mind” (2000, p. 207 [iii, 293])4—​then, this is a way for the human spirit to completely bring to the present what is not possible to reject as other—​as being-​other—​and give to its objectivity the alternative path of its self-​awareness. The cover, under which the idea is laying is in its objecthood [Gegenständlichkeit], which hides and reveals, symbolizes and exhibits, like a Greek statue regarding an Olympian Goddess—​this comprehensible persistence that can be seen as true at first glance and makes conception possible, in which it stops and worries because of its stoppage. Why does Schiller refer to the fact that the idea never shows up in the phenomenon through which is presented? That is to say, the cover that hides and gives it meaning is, at the same time, its cover and, actually, an empty cover. As it is known, Descartes distinguishes, in his metaphysics, two substances: the res cogitans and the res extensa, the thinking, and the extension, which are opposed. Even if we consider the extension as a proof for thinking, we will establish, Descartes writes, that the matter that she has attributed to this thought is not the thought itself, and that the extension of this matter is of a different nature from the extension of this thought, in that the former has a determined place, such that it excludes all other bodily extensions, and this is not the case with the latter (2000, p. 216 [iii, 694]).5 The extent, for that reason, is noticeable sensitively because it always remains, in every place, as one—​one to which one another is attached, which may be subtracted again without resulting in two different things. Among the sensible things that the universal exclusion dominates, the negativity through which

4 Letter from Descartes to Marin Mersenne, July 1641. 5 Letter from Descartes to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, June 28, 1643.

156 Fues such sensible things mutually establish relationships—​in such a way that some refer others to their place persistently—​is clear and true. Throughout this persistence, however, the world splits into unities that are only real when they exclude each other—​into ones and only ones from which no persistence can create two. The world of these things is neither unrepresentable nor imperceptible but the opposite. Nevertheless, the ideas the subject of the conception can get are exhausted in the expression of the figure and their constitution, and, by no means, result in a plan that firmly links them. The conception does not do it with independent perceptions that should not be discussed, deviated, and dispersed by a negativity that admits neither a plan nor a guide, neither an intention nor a hierarchy, and that would join it just with the purpose of promoting a digression from its subject to the whole world—​detached and simultaneous to all duration. The self-​awareness would defeat the self-​being [Selbstsein], instead of instituting it—​the perception would oppose the truth instead of serving it.6 Through idealist conception, the subject reacts to their digressive and discursive individualization [Vereines-​zelung] to the original experience of the effective reality of the world, to the extent that they forego the manifestations of the things, and look at that pure appearing up that unites but does not join them—​in which each other come into contact without communicating among themselves. The indeterminable negativity—​ when it is among the things in which it feels itself at home unconsciously, being imperceptible (for itself), taking it as its self-​being, as its self-​help, and, in this regard, as its means—​turns the general appearing of the phenomena into its mirror, in which it can identify itself as a self, and can move towards all possible phenomena as its objective I-​self-​being [Ich-​Selbst]. The determination of the negativity—​made its own as a plan and direction, as intention and hierarchy—​allows the self-​aware self to order and spread itself as a historical individual. The appearance of the phenomena, in which the things have the universe of their sensory perception and their truth [eins-​zelnen], is originally only one—​the indeterminate individuality [Eins-​zelnheit] itself. Its appropriation turns it from individuality into simplicity in the extension whose content is not referred to any particular place by thinking subjectively—​because it now serves as a means to localize [Ort-​nens], in general terms. The digression of the thinking subject closes in the vast expansion that includes and unifies

6 “Of the three great systems of exclusion which forge discourse—​the forbidden speech, the division of madness and the will to truth, I have spoken of the third at greatest length. […] The first two are constantly becoming more fragile and more uncertain […], the will to truth […] constantly grows stronger, deeper, and more implacable” (Foucault, 1981, pp. 55–​56).

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all phenomena.7 Things are deprived of their appearance and taken in its authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]—​their appearance is kept apart as a precautionary measure. Thus, the idealism, from the beginning, does not forget that “everything simple is merely imaginary, is not ‘true’ ” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 291).8 The idea is and is not its phenomenon. Art’s place and task are in this contradiction, in which the idealism protects the truth from the perception against its truth. It acts between the idea and the phenomenon, determinedly negotiating their contraposition in a work in which, following Schiller, the ideal joins the appearance, and the spirit of the whole the corporeal form. What sensitively ‘appears’ goes through a second mediation, making it lose each part of immediacy that remained as a limit on and against the ideal’s truth—​and turn them into the ideal to have the reality as a whole. Certain mediation—​the revolutionary work with the ideal of nature on its effective reality—​which does not correspond it totally, characterizes and defines the artistic work. There is not space for irony yet. Art is, according to Solger, the perfect acting determined. Of which kind? Of certain mediation? The contradiction that makes art possible, which art itself overcome, comes from the use of the universal negativity, as a result of the undetermined sensible world, towards the thinking subject that determines it as mediation. As such, it determines itself as self-​I and, later, as the historical individual. In the determined, which has the stimulus and the reason for the infinite contradiction in the quiet resistance of the sensible, the human being gives himself the historical and generic shape of the idealist self-​awareness—​ which, at the same time, he cannot overcome as a fundamental sociological module without overcoming himself. If the art comes to such an overcoming in the practical reality, it would be made to determine its acting like a complete mediation of that incomplete mediating because of the separation between thinking and intuition. If it succeeds, its work would wipe out the primary condition of the concept of idealism and would become as strange to its subject as a symbolic complex [Zeichenkomplex] from a space dimensioned on one another manner.9 The work would disappear from the context of sense 7 To the scientific discourse—​to the rational discourse focused on finding the truth—​underlies the following principle: “Not everything is true; but in every point and in every moment there is a recognizable and expressible truth […]. The truth is everywhere; it depends only on us to find the correct perspective, the appropriate angle, the instruments necessary for its discovery” (Foucault, 1975, p. 151). 8 “Logic was intended as facilitation; as a means of expression, not as truth. Later it acquired the effect of truth” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 291). 9 “all that is mortal dissolved away—​pure light, pure freedom, pure power—​no shadows, no limits, nothing more of all that” (Schiller, 1879, p. 39).

158 Fues [Sinnzusammenhang] of its time while makes it present. If the work does not disappear, it remains as an artistic work at its disposal and, then, pretends a mediation that does not take place in the practical reality—​even though every practical reality moves toward it. However, this replicates the classic romantic understanding of art—​the truth of the work is precisely in such a pretense. It raises an unavoidable demand because of its simplicity and, it is unattainable to the extent that, in the place where the idea and the phenomenon collide, it insists on the perfect mediation to make the hunger for mediation dispel in its realization. In beauty, the concept of practical reality fills itself. The majority feels that and claims for it. However, it is to some extent so adapted to the ordinary practical reality that does not perceive how it and its concept confusingly disintegrate into nothingness, perception, irony, only with which, nonetheless, stands out in property the real understanding of the art (Raumer and Tieck, 1973, p. 403).10 The artistic work attempts to decide on ‘the truth about the truth.’ Moreover, it tells the truth. However, it lacks the voice when speaking and speaks of this failure in many forms. All its relationships start and end from nothingness. That is irony—​the place and purpose of the romantic-​idealistic piece of art: the collapsing architecture of mediation, foundational of the idealism, in its success and consequence. Nothingness as truth. How could nothingness be parodied? Henri Poschmann’s interpretation of Leonce und Lena focuses on scene 2, act iii: the scene of the farmers—​the only one that charges pseudo-​feudalism through a satirical overinterpretation. Poschmann immediately claimed that such a scene does not match the rest of the piece. “Despite that, or, as will be shown, precisely because of that reason, it contains the key not only of the fundamental content of the piece but, at the same time, of its formal and constructive principle, technic-​dramatic” (Poschmann, 1981, p.  125). Poschmann discusses the piece is leaving behind something between the aristocrats and the courtesans—​the contraposition between the exploitative aristocracy and the exploited farmer; that is to say: the class struggle (1981; see also Kim, 2002). Being the topic of Büchner’s  Leonce und Lena, why does not he call this by its name and put this on the scene together with its sentences? Büchner uses here, Poschmann says, “a classic, dramatic form truly closed, in contrast to the two other pieces” (1981, p. 131). This form, which follows the popular way 10

Letter from Solger to Tieck, April 7, 1816.

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of thinking, in general terms, owes its harmonic unity to the exclusion of the contraposition of classes, and, “according to Büchner, is part of the object of criticism. That is the reason why it can only contain the criticism only through difficulty” (1981, p. 129). With the scene of the farmers, this container is punctured in one place—​light is thrown inside it and falls on its overly hidden functions of exclusion. The acts of speaking between Leonce, Lena, Valerio, and the bustling statement of King Peter—​marked by the hyphens and question marks always read concerning the last scene of iii—​are discourses to silence, limit, mince-​its-​words [Drumherum-​Sprenchens], and speak-​with-​confidence [Sich-​in-​Sicherheit-​Sprechens]. The dramatic form’s classic container, which excludes criticism to class society, is stated by its damage as precisely such an act of exclusion and, in this sense, is used against the aim of its creator. The free-​acting—​without goals—​of the characters appears in its secret goal that justifies it. Now, it becomes apparent that their languages correspond no other aim but to eradicate all meaning—​despite the suffering caused, as in the case of Leonce. Consequently, Poschmann denies all weight to that character concerning the real and quiet topic of the piece (1981, p. 136): It is incredible as an opinion against it, the rebelliousness put on the table became time ago into empty opposition and mere verbosity. […] The spiritual situation of the argument between Valerio and his Lord, an imitation of a fundamental part of the bourgeois drama, is lost amid verbal, senseless argument. His foolish reasoning does not change anything in the system in which he is the factual co-​carrier and co-​curator. The bourgeois principles against the rules of the feudal society and the German pseudo-​absolutism do not have subversive effectiveness. This argument is convincing.11 It is even impressive. From here, we can show how literature can parody nothingness as truth. Let us take, as a starting point, the fact that, in the modern and rational self-​draft of the human being, all metaphysical relationships are, at the same 11

The scene of the farmers, decisive in Poschmann’s interpretation, comes probably from a previous work phase, when Büchner wrote his text to be presented in the event organized by Cotta publishers, ca. February and end-​July, 1836 (see Hauschild, 1985, p. 346 ff.). Is this a remnant that Büchner left in the final version by accident? Rather, this is an intentionally written and isolated remnant. This idea is supported by the fact that the scene of the policemen in a fragment of the manuscript H1—​which transmits the satirical sign and, also, a move towards Valerio’s language—​did not receive any place in the final version—​as long as we can really talk, in the history of the transmission of Leonce und Lena, about a final version (Hauschild, 1985; see also Mayer, 1987).

160 Fues time, originally social, and its categories are essential determinations of the social and economic relationship. Thus, as Descartes stated, the extension of the thinking is, at the same time, a social space in which no space and no subject is able to exclude any other from its position—​all convene, assemble, focused on the unique order-​action [Ort-​nung]—​but, also, in the same way, one that each one can dissolve, disorientate, decentralize, and relocate [entort-​nen]. The latter is the space of the real liberal society without classes, in which every stone [Baustein] turns into a playing piece [Spielstein], and vice versa. In contrast, beyond that is the space of the existing modern society—​from the structured state of the illustrated absolutism to the democratically bureaucratic republic of the interest associations. In it, places and subjects exclude any other: all of them play a unique organizing function to achieve a definition and orientation towards a center that decides about the middle and the periphery, height and depth, tightness, and breadth. Both spaces have an indissoluble relationship, though immediate throughout, as that between thinking and sensibility. Both spaces have an indissoluble relationship, though immediate throughout, as that between thinking and sensibility. Schiller understands the space of thinking as the space of ‘ideally’—​of the reality that shows up, so real—​and, in this sense, he opposes historically each other as utopia and actuality in a relationship of absolute immediacy. The ideal art must establish a mediation that does not exist between the two spaces and create a space of another kind that, as a mean, relates both and links them reciprocally. This fact happens in the fictional text. In such a space, the utopia of the classless society is valuable as a deconstructive and reconstructive law for the current society, structurally organized into classes, to the extent that it does not leave in place a single stone of the existent order to be upgraded in and from its remnants. The outside space of literature expands through the spaces to which it serves and transforms itself into its goal via its exposition, following its own rule and responsibility. In this sense, it hides that both spaces reject each other immediately. Schiller’s aesthetics excludes the class struggle as well as infuses it with its opposite and overcomes it through this decision.12

12

“True art […] does not aim merely at a temporary play; it seriously intends not to transpose a person into a merely momentary dream of freedom, but to make him really and in fact free, and to accomplish this by awakening in him a force, exercising it and developing it, to thrust the sensuous world, which otherwise only presses upon us as crude material, bearing down upon us as a blind power, into an objective distance, to transpose it into a free work of our mind, and to achieve mastery over the material with ideas” (Schiller, 2015, p. 34).

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Solger’s aesthetics is about the classic aesthetical model ‘ideally/​reality,’ albeit, through its mediation, it results in other consequences for the space of art because of the rejection of the spaces of socialization that it brings to the historicity. Art flourishes and exists as a space of mediation in the intersection of such rejection. Art gives a place, a shape, a language, to the original silent opposition between essence and phenomenon, idea, and reality of modernity. However, this language is not its language. It is extracted, removed, separated from it, and projected outwards from its constellations—​like monks’ prediction, from the constellations, of the flight of the birds—​and, as such, it is inauthentic and helpless. Art cannot abandon this inauthenticity and helpless without abandoning itself, but it can self-​characterize itself through them as with an always present reference to its task, to the extent that, thus, it withdraws the mediation in which it becomes a necessary instance to the objective conception of the history of sense—​in the immediacy—​and, in this sense, drives its work towards the nothingness. This is the point of view of the irony: to establish the artistic work as a need for fictional mediation and, therefore equivalent, substitute it with its immediacy—​which corresponds to the originally socio-​historical immediacy that demands and rejects its mediation and, precisely because of such a reason, it is not identical to it—​to then display it and, once displayed, mess it up through the reference to its origins.13 Solger’s aesthetics excludes the class struggle to the extent that it includes and short-​circuits it through that inclusion and, thus, reduces it to the nothingness produced by its adversaries through the mutual rejection as ‘the truth.’ The ‘true’ is the whole; the whole is the mediated unity of the extension of thinking and sensibility. Moreover, unity’s truth is its throwback to immediacy from which it flourished in the form of simplicity. The classic artwork embodies and gives voice to that unity as its symbol, but, in doing so, it silences its origins and value—​and even the romantic irony can allude to them only to the extent that it asserts its muteness in and against the same language that silences them. In Leonce und Lena, Büchner’s aim is not to figure out an aesthetical solution to the problem of the simple truth that classic and romantic aesthetics would bid. Far from that, he breaks with the law of such a truth. The form of his work understands the ironic verification that cancels itself as inclusion, as immediately negative confirmation of the simple unity of the whole, and, in such a way, opposes it with the exclusion. The farmer’s scene 13

“The fictitious is never in things or in people, but in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between them […] Therefore, fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible” (Foucault, 1987, pp. 23–​24).

162 Fues (iii, 2) is as opposed to the rest of the romantic-​idealistic comedy—​in such an unrecognizable and de-​committed manner—​as the currency of the class society, which is as it should be and is opposed to the utopia of its essential liberalism that hides and drives it. Finally, Büchner links, through his language style, the scene of the farmers to the rest of his play14 in such a way that it is possible to read the exclusion as ‘abstraction,’ as consideration immediately negative of the form, closed upon itself, of the simple truth. In this sense, he makes it known as a ring road or as a tangent that moves intentionally wrongly—​but also as the access that only such an act of getting lost makes possible. Let us summarize Poschmann’s thesis until now: the epicenter of Leonce und Lena refers—​from its content—​to its environment, and this reference characterizes its exclusion. Its language passes through it through immediate negativity—​ as happens with the mirrors in Alice behind the Glasses, by Lewis Carroll. How can we think the relationship between such a center and its environment—​that dominates, organizes, and unify it, and in which, however, the categories of domination, organization, and identity must disappear—​without establishing institutions to fix itself by any means, including through negativity? Could it be even thought? Could the form of the self-​determination of thinking in the modernity be thought out of the reflection? “Any purely reflexive discourse runs the risk of leading the experience of the outside back to the dimension of interiority” (Foucault, 1987, p. 21), and bringing it to the perspective in which the general truth exists—​and is demonstrated—​and in which it must be blamed for its simplicity. Does thinking figures can overtake dialectics’ generosity—​in terms of frankness—​and know how to prevent the emergence of the truth? Are, perhaps, the weakness and the digression that marks the incommensurable proximity—​ or the blink and the pause in breathing—​the signs of an unknown death that 14 “MAGISTRATE:  My dear schoolmaster, how are your people holding up? SCHOOLMASTER:  They’re holding up so well in their suffering that for quite some time now they have been holding each other up. They valiantly pour spirits into themselves, else they couldn’t possibly hold out in the heat” (Büchner, 1983, p. 50 [iii, 2]). The schoolmaster speaks almost like Valerio (whose speech I will discuss later). However, while Valerio almost speaks only of himself (his speech knows others only as a climax), the schoolmaster talks almost only about others. According to this, we can divide the well-​known double slogan as follows: Gozzi’s ‘e la fame?’ is valid for the scene of the farmers and Alfieri’s ‘e la fama?’ is useful for the rest. Hunger forces each individual being to seek the experience of the other (Freud, 2015), whereas fame, in Italian, by no means is only ‘fame’ [Ruhm], the most used translation in most editions, but also, and, in the first place, ‘call, rumor’ [Ruf, Gerücht], narrative that expands itself through its characteristic discourse. According to Mayer’s reproduction of the H1 manuscript fragment, Büchner centered both slogans at the end of the page, with half a blank line between them. Is not this the adequate graphic representation of abstraction and exclusion as a whole?

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validates the perfection? Who knows? If we have to confirm our thesis, nobody is better to do it than the characters of the play in their language: Valerio with his “empty gestural play and his mere verbalism,” and Valerio and Leonce with their “non-​sense verbal fighting” (Poschmann, 1981, p. 136). What Henri Poschmann notices in Leonce und Lena is that the literary discourse opens, de-​imagined [de-​imaginiert], and, thus, gives to modern thinking the universally closed commercial state of the identity and the otherness: the device for the modern thinking. Unfortunately, Poschmann’s discourse does not pay attention to that observation since it pursues it. That is to say, in the place—​or, more precisely, in the no-​place—​of the exclusion between the scene of the farmers and the rest of the play, he notices a “common denominator objectively established” (Poschmann, 1981, p. 145) that looks like the materialist criticism, in development in the young Marx, to the bourgeoisie—​like two drops of water that resemble each other: to find this common denominator objectively established—​but not as Marx did in the form of the conceptual determination—​and to drive the criticism towards it (almost to the epicenter of the modern social problems), the critic should adopt the point of view of the youngest class, which even just now come into scene, to which the opposition between the feudal and the bourgeois structures is still relative, which not only has interest in the disappearance of the absolutism of a particular social class but, objectively, in the abolition of the class society in general terms, and that does not need any ideological deception […] This perspective comes […] from the point of view above demonstrated […], from the correlation, understood in a materialist sense, between political and ideological conceptions (to which is added, in Büchner, the specifically aesthetical conceptions), and the existent vital relationships (Poschmann, 1981, p. 136). We can infer, overall, the point of view of the interpreter concerning the artistic work. He makes it rest, in the first place, on the political and ideological conception of the existent vital relationships. He allows it to introduce the aesthetical conception—​so to speak, as a classifier criterion of its pure form—​ and legitimate such a hierarchy through the allusion to the materialist social theory of the young Marx, which—​free from ideological deception as a basis for every truly rational criticism—​does not claim more criticism. All that was not applied to Leonce und Lena until the play achieved its value. Instead, in its horizon appears the question of whether, in Leonce und Lena, consequently, Büchner attempts to find a common denominator in the farmers’ scene and the rest of his play, or he shares the obsession of the modern thinking through

164 Fues the category of mediation, or he does not drive his criticism precisely to that obsession, or he wants to cancel it in favor of an evening of comedy, instead of driving it almost towards the epicenter of the modern society problems. All the same, it drives it beyond its core since it attacks and wipes out the device of its simple truth. ‘Man must think,’ King Peter says. That is right because only by thinking the identity, he can determine his being as a concept of his self-​ awareness and, thus, as a human being. However, the naked substance of the self has to be coated with ‘attributes, accidents, properties, and modifications’ to become a subject of domination and self-​domination. Moreover, what if something so extraordinary as literature bothers the ordering of this suit, once its categories have fallen?: “I am completely bewildered […] where is my shirt, where are my pants? Stop, for shame! The free will is all open there in front” (Büchner, 1983, p. 20 [i, 2]; see also Giuriato, 2015). That is also right. The simple truth of the imaginary presents failures and part of these failures. From his pants and sentences appears the meaning to whose potential differentiator it owes its power—​which, because of its power, aims to ignore the differentiation of the human beings into two genres (in two truths; maybe in two ways of reasoning that move each other) (Braun, 1988, p. 14 ff.). Explicitly, Poschmann’s discourse is about the disorder of life and King Peter’s opinions, while advocates for its discursivity to be able to put them in order again. If the literary being becomes the outside of the self-​awareness of the self-​I [Ich-​identischen Selbstbewusstseins]—​armored, but not demonstrating the non-​figurative [ungegenständlich] positivity of the sensible individuality—​ through its exit from the classic aesthetics, its interpretation must also respect and reproduce this development (in both characteristic senses)—​if it keeps up its discourse from and for such self-​awareness and its simple truth. Initially, the task of the Interpres is the Interpretatio divum, that is to say, the mediation between the discourse of the dreams and the symbols and the discourse of the subject who agrees with himself regarding his self-​awareness, in whose name he acts (Anton, 1976, p. 514 f.). If he carries out this negotiation in a way capable of completely transmitting one discourse to another—​in such a way that the other scenery of dreams and symbols only provides the sensitive effect of the otherness—​then, he deprives his principal from the sole instance that can demonstrate its value against its fictitiously pure omnipotence—​and he commits himself to the definitive character of the monotony, to the boredom of its demand that satisfies itself and, thus, to his world. “Your Majesty, perhaps it is so, perhaps, on the other hand, it is not so” (Büchner, 1983, p. 21 [i, 2]; see also Kim, 2002). Like King Peter, he has the right to present information in such a manner. The informative flow from one discourse to another, as the truth of the self-​awareness, can let it flourish and drive—​must divide it into

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isles that not only symbolize its ordering in its place, in the localization [Ort-​ nung] of the only identical, but, in this sense, at the same time, subtract its necessity. We are talking about signs that mark, through tension, its destruction in its empty universe—​placed before all mediation without becoming empty signs. In short, the interpretation has to carry out its task gracefully [geistreich], “if we understand that spirit [Geist]—​that of a business that goes beyond the business itself—​in general, it stimulates and occupies the free capacity” (Schiller, 1985a, p. 118).15 Such a spirit neither contradicts the methodical precision of science nor the historical meticulousness of philology:  “gracefully quickly straight ahead, together with conventionality, positivity, receivedness, but maybe without asking and looking around, even pedantically,” said Goethe (quoted in Müller, 1982, p. 129).16 Friedrich Schlegel depicts the form of the discourse corresponding to this claim in his observations about the jest [Witz]: “the form of the jest is the appearance of the absolute antithesis. Rather: the inauthentic jest simplifies the absolute antithesis without thereby SOMETHING is raised as a thesis” (Schlegel, 1981, p. 129 [v, 542]).17 In the inauthentic jest, quiet and endless reflection is in charge of identifying its opposite until its disappearance in the comprehensive synthesis of the simple truth. Its success depends on the effect of a comprehensive synthesis. Contrarily, in the authentic jest, we understand the thesis as something that goes beyond such a procedure—​the appearance of the perfect synthesis that shows simplicity as its being but also as a thesis that, through its antithesis, is still necessarily unclear to reflection. The jest creates reflection as a self-​awareness method diverted towards and from its goal, depending on its localization between two worlds [Zwischenwelten]—​in whose outside, the literary being lives like Epicurean gods in their interworlds. The interpretation of the science of literature, which does not usually constraint the spirit in its informative task, in general terms, runs the risk today of being drowned in the deluge of information of the postmodern media society as its museum: “the text breaks off and calmly the answers keep ganging up” (Enzensberger, 1976, p. 144). Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write michel foucault (1972, p. 17)

15 16 17

Letter from Schiller to Körner, March 17, 1802. Letter from Goethe to Chancellor von Müller, June 30, 1824. See also v, 1039:  “Jest has territory more vast than art and science” (Schlegel, 1981, p. 171).

166 Fues If the train of Zurich goes slowly enough in its entrance to Basel, from the walls between the road and the railway, we can read the following question: ‘If I had to die tomorrow, what would I  read tonight?’ If I—​or another I who notices these sentences on the road—​had to die tomorrow, would he or she read something? Does not he or she prefer to anesthetize or get drunk, or anticipate his or her end to put an end to the torture of the self-​awareness? However, the unknown subject—​or the unknown subjects (maybe this is a work of two)—​ persists on reading. What do they ask themselves—​if they ask something? Who would know the answer without the daily violence of a piece of advice? Writing is faded and repainted with more lived colors and graces—​and who passes it precisely has time enough to catch it from the corner of the eye. Then, one must think of stepping off the train without leaving anything there, and pay attention not to forget one’s goals—​and, writings of one another kind fall under their gaze from the underground of the train station and from the headlines at the kiosk to the bright poster on the roof of the hotel: ‘If I had to die tomorrow, what would I read tonight?’ At best, perhaps, a text from the same story that the text of that question? From the beginning, the literature of modernity states that its text is this text. Even Critische Dichtkunst [Critical Poetry], by Jacob Breitinger, establishes that poetry is like the ability to “represent absent things as present things to men, and give them to them, at the same time, to be felt and experienced” (1740, p. 14).18 Moreover, the Tabulae Votivae [Votive Tablets], by Friedrich Schiller, says to the poets: “Let language be to the thee what a body is to lovers; The body it is that divides and that unites them again” (1879, p. 292). The beings are themselves inseparable and incompatible, but they can assume an appearance able to separate and join. By themselves, they are not different from the essence [Wesen]—​language itself establishes this difference through an external and supplementary determination. They are the differentiation between their unity and the essence itself—​their being’s absolute nullity and the being of the essence—​through which they exist to yearn for its overcoming.19 The mute simplicity and powerless of the act of differentiating—​the pure and mere death—​has a language and a body of divided appearance, and gives existence 18

19

Such a power corresponds to the enlightening violence of the poetic beauty:  “[i]‌t is a luminous thunderbolt of the truth that penetrates with such a force in the senses and in the spirit that we cannot defend ourselves from the inattention that so emptily lies in us, as to feel it” (Breitinger, 1740, p. 112). “It is because of the essence that the existence is a phenomenon, that is to say:  what appears in the phenomenon is the essence, but the phenomenon is, at the same time, only phenomenon; it contains in itself, at the same time, the fact of not being the essence” (Hegel, 1971, p. 501).

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to the essential schemata of the essence itself through the adequate difference between identity and otherness. The essence is its appearance because only by its means loses it its self-​determination, its self-​difference, its nullity, and, at the same time, gets lost in it the annihilating [ver-​nichtenden] appearance of its own self—​this is because as soon as it is divided and finds in its separation (I mean, in the identification and the fact of becoming one another) the union, it tastes its practical reality and its simplicity. Love only exists in the ritual game of the bodies. Nevertheless, it is not only a matter of such a ritual; it is, at the same time, the nullity at the bottom of its necessity and the freedom that runs away the ritual and drives it towards its temptation. Voluptuousness understood as the “little death” becomes an expression that the self who participates in the cyclical time, in the twilight, and the return. To some extent, the self figures out—​in its reassuring “news”—​ that not only does it have to die, but it also has to return (Braun, 1988, p. 288). The fact that the self can die today and come back tomorrow is possible because of the significant death under the shadow of the small one—​a death that is of such essential greatness that the difference between death and life becomes futile. In this sense, practical reality depends on the fact that its being—​as difference—​is unconditionally valuable for its time, and nothing but the seriousness and pain of the negativity determines historically and socially its appearance. Would the story that the self would read tonight already have a text whose object is the absolute value if he or she has to die tomorrow? Should he or she experience as absence the fact that the simplicity and the nullity of the essential act of differencing comes into the effectively real and disappears from its appearance and meeting?—​that is to say, the fact that the small death, the incomplete ritual of separating and joining and of promising and corresponding, is on the significant death to the extent that hides, repress, and expels it. If I had to die tomorrow, I would like to read a text tonight in which the small daily death does not shift and delay the pure and general death but makes it present in the horizon of the punctuation marks—​they structure and stylize it, as signs that deny the fixation and deprive it of its idleness and fright by means of that actuality that alienate it. The poetry of the literature in the prose of the practical reality consists of being able, from the beginning, to represent the human being as actual—​its absence [Ab-​Wesenheit] in the middle of the bright beam of its truth—​in such a way that it is given to feel and to perceive, and not only those things that are not present [abwesende Dinge].

168 Fues Literature—​like the poetry of  visualization  [Vergegenwärtigung] and the sense for sense—​depends on the absolute value of its being as differentiation and essential negativity. In other words, its being as the space for the new radically other, the unknown as the unrecognized—​to which both the Cartesian doubt principle and the hope principle by Bloch correspond. Sense [Sinn] has an ingenious [sinnig] origin. Initially, the word means both trip and road, and it has a relationship with the verb to send [senden] and, therefore, with the Latin word sentire, which is related to the French sentier and the Italian sentiero (Kluge, 1891). In short, it means the substantial certainty of the existential orientation: the imperturbable trail of the right vital road adjusted to the time. The modern subject attempts to remain faithful to such certainty, as well as to transform it into a method that allows getting this being unhindered and its possible practical reality—​as long as it remains at its disposal, completely commits its self to its progress, and subtracts itself from it. To be in charge of its self looks for itself, in this adventure, as the prototype of what is not but would be able to be in such a way that it can say about itself what only Yahweh was able to say: ‘I will be who I will be.’ Towards uncertainty, it strives to preserve the substance of the certainty of its self to find the simple unity of its search to find itself again. Now, it is certainly capable of pursuing the two different moments of its purpose. However, it is not capable of establishing them, as Yahweh did, in the same sequence. In this sense, it splits from the beginning in the double purpose of the experience of itself and the self-​assurance, and its unity has no other basis than this division. A non-​objective essence is a non-​ essence; a purely objective essence is unessential. As long as it is a matter of its individuality, the modern subject is divided into essence and practical reality, substantiality and reality, to the point of tightening the rope, I mean, to the point of having the individuation and the division included in the simplicity of its difference and the self-​I that goes off in the lost—​reached with difficulty—​ of its contradiction (Hegel, 1970). The Middle Ages coped with death as with another life. The Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance guided it [führen es] since they suffer from it. Baroque and Rationalism resigned to death as a penance imposed by right and according to the law. Only the subject of sense understands death as a fate caused by himself, configured with the history of its self. If I, ambiguously—​as it behaves in each today—​had to die tomorrow, tonight I would like to read a text that takes, as a starting point, the contradiction between essence and practical reality, between substantiality and reality, in its indifference and so-​ and-​so, as the rule of a game that creates meaning through its ambiguity—​a text that precisely expresses it because its fate has ceased to be an object for itself.

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Literature, the poetry of visualization [Vergegenwärtigung], a sense of actuality that comes and stops the sense’s current past, depends on the absolute value of its being and the settlement of its essence into both the self-​determining negativity and its determinate negations. How could this time transfer the experience that its essence is exhausted but not dissolved, that the contradiction between the negativity that determines itself, and the determined negations that have been taken for itself, has a form that not only does not overcome it—​ like the poetry of visualization—​but invalidates it for its preservation? Modernity made this experience with itself during the Restoration, in the years after the fall of Napoleon. Alfred de Musset describes it in Confessions of a Child of the Century (1910, p. 7): Three elements entered into the life which offered itself to these children: behind them a past forever destroyed, still quivering on its ruins with all the fossils of centuries of absolutism; before them the aurora of an immense horizon, the first gleams of the future; and between these two worlds—​like the ocean which separates the Old World from the New—​something vague and floating, a troubled sea filled with wreckage, traversed from time to time by some distant sailboat or some ship trailing thick clouds of smoke; the present, in a word, which separates the past from the future, which is neither the one nor the other, which resembles both. Does this feature correspond only to 19th century, or only to its first third, or does it refer to a condition of modernity, to a time in the essential determination of its being that has only reached its end in the last 20 years, with the beginning of the 3rd Industrial Revolution? In 1839, Heinrich Heine talked of the “July Revolution that, so to speak, split our times into two halves,” and concluded: “the people have bled and suffered not for themselves but for others. In July 1830 they won the victory for that bourgeoisie that is worth no more than the noblesse it has replaced, with the same egotism” (2006, pp.  48–​49). On November 17, 1830, Paris, Ludwig Börne wrote: these men who have fought against the entire aristocracy for fifteen years, who have barely won, have not yet dried their sweat and already want to build a new aristocracy for themselves: an aristocracy of money, a state of wealthy men (1986, p. 67). Two years later replied: “this toxic monetary economy dries up, like the sirocco, to all the nobles, and if it lasts ten years, would not there then be any tyrant to

170 Fues give value to the effort of subduing such a mummified people?” (1986, p. 482).20 The industrialization of Germany, according to the capitalist patterns, began in the twenties of the 19th century, accelerated after 1830, and came to an end between 1850 and 1873, when Germany placed itself at the same level that their neighbors (Treue, 1975; Nipperdey, 1983).21 Did literature react to this development—​which threatened its poetry, its free play with and by sense—​by transforming it into a ceremonial of conservation of meaning—​perhaps with a text that marks and breaks its own time as a turning point of modernity? To think of what people won’t do out of boredom! They study out of boredom; they pray out of boredom; they fall in love, marry, reproduce out of boredom and finally die out of boredom and—​and that’s the humor of it—​they do all this with the most solemn of faces, not noticing what it’s all about, and God only knows what they mean by it. All these heroes, these geniuses, these numskulls, these saints, these sinners, these upright citizens are basically nothing but artful dodgers. Why do I of all people have to know this? Why can’t I become important to myself and dress the poor puppet in a frock coat and put an umbrella in its hand, thereby turning it into something very righteous and very useful and very moral? The man who just left me, I envied him. I would have liked to beat him up out of envy. Oh to be somebody else for once! Just for one minute (Büchner, 1983, p. 16 [i, 1]).22 Also, what men do is boring. They produce nothing but boredom. Not the creative boredom—​the tense balance in every action equivocally driven towards itself—​but what Hölderlin calls “the ennui of this century” (1990, p.  94), in Hyperion:  the vital time that becomes superficial everywhere and aligns every experience, in which consumption is also announced as the future—​the future repeats what is rejected by wrapping it with bright paper, and all the effort put in the meaning leads to a present whose uninterrupted actuality no longer allows any visualization. The new subject has experience as a source

20 21 22

Letter dated January 23, 1832. Friedrich-​Wilhelm Henning summarizes the time from 1800 to 1835 as “the resurgence from the traditional economy and society” (1979, p. 15). In the manuscript fragment transmitted, H1, reproduced by Hauschild (1985), Leonce is still called, anonymously, ‘Prince.’ For this reason, Hauschild assumes that this is a fragment of a provisional copy for the version of the Cotta publishing house (see Hauschild, 1985). We follow it because, in our opinion, it contains references to a general tendency of the entire text that the later elaboration turns into its material and, by doing so, hides it.

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and power of unlimited possibilities, but it does so always within the limits of the same experience. His life, which he considered until then too brief and scarce, becomes, through the continuous and quick transformation of the recognized [Erkannte] into the known [Bekannte], into the insipid, sterile, too-​long lengthiness:  the boring (Völker, 1975; 1983; Bolten, 1985). Leonce asks himself why should he know that and, also because of that, be excluded from the community of severe boredom towards misery and the margins of its festive and blind seriousness—​turned into an impotent joker who suffers because of foolishness he cannot avoid by any entertainment.23 It is necessary to be someone different: neither subject of boredom nor impotent outsider of his subjectivity, in which, nevertheless, all sense becomes effectively real and originally witnesses itself. The topic of the piece has been characterized: “in fact, boredom is the topic of the entire piece” (Martens, 1977, p. 150; see also Sanna, 2015). Leonce und Lena represents what has no longer present and, in its already-​not-​being-​there and absence, configures the center of rotation and the cornerstone for the discourse of all the characters who talk to each other and have a dialog with the deaf. “Let language be to the thee what a body is to lovers; The body it is that divides and that unites them again” (Schiller, 1879, p. 292). What should a poet do with such an instruction, in a time when human beings have become automata and, according to Valerio, have “a fine, fine spring of ruby under the nail of the little toe on the right foot; press it just a tiny bit and the mechanism will run for a full fifteen years” (Büchner, 1983, p. 55 [iii, 3])? What should a poet do at a time, therefore, in which language is the information program that coordinates automata beings? Schiller’s dictum is valid for poets at a time before the beginning of boredom. What about the poets of this time? How is it possible to give the word to the automata without having them talking automatically, and without denying that none of the characters can become nothing more than an automaton? “Man,” Leonce says to Valerio after having wanted to get out the President of the State Council, “[m]‌an, you’re nothing but a bad pun. You have neither father nor mother, it’s the five vowels combined that created you” (Büchner, 1983, p. 29 [i, 3]). “And you, my Prince,” Valerio says, “are a book without letters, 23

“According to these words, it is difficult not to see in Leonce’s idleness anything other than the ‘way of life of the aristocrats’ ” (Poschmann, 1981, p. 127). “In Lena’s idleness and boredom it is less dominating the fact of being materially free from the duty to work—​ or boredom suffered from a life that has become sterile because of the enjoyment and lack of meaning—​than the impetuous desire for absolute liberation and fulfillment in an activity that is recognized and accepted as devoid of meaning” (Völker, 1983, p. 123).

172 Fues a book with nothing but dashes” (Büchner, 1983, p. 29 [i, 3]; see also Oesterle, 2014). Valerio comes running from somewhere to the first scene and running away from the boredom of the century with haste that causes admiration in Leonce: “how that man runs! If only there were something under the sun that could still make me run” (Büchner, 1983, p. 16 [i, 1]). No one and nothing precisely different from Valerio. Leonce only knows the literal passage of his biography but—​or precisely because of that reason—​he trusts his biography: I have a hasty [läufig] life course [Lebenslauf]. Because only my career [mein Laufen] has saved my life [mein Leben], in the course [im Lauf] of this war, from a career that wanted to make a hole in it. As a consequence of this salvation of human life, I have gotten a dry cough that makes the doctor suppose my life has been a loping, and I get a loping TB [Auszehrung]. Since then, I  also realized that I  was devoid of sustenance [Zehrung], I  fell or instead I  became aware of a consumerist fever [zehrendes Fieber] because, every day, to preserve a defender of the homeland, I had to get good soup, good meat, good bread, and drink a good wine (H1, I, 1). The four vowels—​a, e, i, o—​are engaged there from the air of the alphabetic order they need for the writing of life [Leben-​Schreiben], and they give themselves v for u and x for v, in such a way that all sounds work [laufen] with them.24 Leonce is right: this man is nothing but a terrible play on the road, infinitely steep, elusive, smoothed, of the words that move from letter to letter, which accompany [be-​gleitenden] the phrase in the sentence. Now, substantiality and reality—​together with poetry in Leonce’s life—​penetrates [hineinlaufen] this game, with the ‘luminous thunderbolt of the true,’ and the essence and the practical reality, to put them into movement. Leonce is right:  that man is nothing but a crumbly wordplay on the way, infinitely steep, elusive, smoothed, of the words that move from letter to letter, that accompany [be-​ gleitenden] us from sentence to sentence. Whoever stops in it will always find it where he or she will have just been. Such a vital trajectory allows us to make the experience of what has the saying in Leonce’s life. Leonce himself admits that (Büchner, 1983, p. 25 [i, 3]; see also Eder, 2014): 24

“Para-​eloquence [Parasuada] that does not come from the mouth of real human beings, but needs absolutely nothing, arises in the air, is there, grows […] and it is established among men once and for all.” That is what Robert Musil says about the “burlesque figures” (1921, quoted in Goltschnigg, 1974, p. 235).

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My life yawns at me like a large white sheet of paper that I am supposed to cover with writing, but I can’t put down one letter. My head is an empty ballroom, a few wilted roses and wrinkled ribbons on the floor, broken violins in the corner, the last dancers have taken off their masks and are looking at each other with dead-​tired eyes. Twenty-​four times each day I turn myself inside out like a glove. Oh I know myself, I know what I will think and dream fifteen minutes from now, a week from now, a year from now. God, what have I done wrong, why do you make me recite my lesson over and over as though I were a schoolboy? The history of this life results in a book without letters—​because it is always the same, and everything that happens in it is a variation of the same event, nothing expressed in it has a different meaning. The time in which it must be fulfilled remains a blank sheet of paper in which one cannot write: this is boredom. Leonce’s self-​consciousness is empty like the Bacchic delirium of conceiving, in which no member stops getting drunk, empty, devoid of the exciting and breathtaking adventure of self-​consciousness and the experience of the self. Nothing remains other than representations of its beauty, which no longer represent what they should mean but bear the mark of its exhaustion ostensibly: the withered roses will neither bloom nor smell again, the wrinkled ribbons do not adorn anybody, the violins with the skipped strings do not produce any sound, and the dancers, who by showing their real face have death in front of their eyes, will not see anyone else in front of them—​nor will they take a single step. Leonce can turn around and do whatever he wants: he cannot be anyone else, not even for a minute. He must repeat the lesson of his century, tediously, again and again. He can only take himself to a language that cancels him all the time. Valerio is right: this Leonce is a book without letters, with only question marks that witness deleted thoughts. Life as a deletion leads to the deletion of life. Lena—​who perfectly meets Leonce’s expectations regarding women:  “infinitely beautiful and infinitely witless” (Büchner, 1983, p. 36 [ii, 1]), an idea, a symbol [Sinnbild] from which the sense [Sinn] disappears and only the image [Bild] remains—​refines Leonce in “The Garden. Night and Moonshine” (Büchner, 1983, p. 44 [ii, 4]), in her tone,25 modulating him to immobility, consumption, death. Lena’s speech is full of metaphors. If we pay attention, she speaks with a single metaphor because the word it represents and illustrates is always the same: ‘death.’ The moon, according to the metaphorical comparison, is like a sleeping child, and 25

“in such a way that Leonce’s long final reply, actually, only meets what Lena’s voice already promises and gives at the beginning” (Schröder, 1966, p. 115; see also Weierhausen, 2014).

174 Fues his dream is one of death. The sleeping child is also an angel, but a death angel, and from the ‘Stand up and walk!’ that Leonce whispers in Lena’s ear, nothing comes but the request for a funeral song for the dead moon, the death angel, the child that rests in the mortuary sleep. Lena’s speech seems to link metaphors, but the appearances are deceptive—​ the chain does not go beyond its first link. The image to which all metaphorical relationships are limited becomes inexpressive because it does not illustrate but defigures [ent-​bildlicht]: because the light of the moon and its representations are unraveled in an image whose imaginative foundation rests on rigidity, darkness, and invisibility. The moon is like a sleeping child, and its sleeping is death. The bliss of this sleep is his dreams, and the happiest dream is also death. Even the kiss is death, so beautiful, says Leonce, “that Nature herself hates life and falls in love with death” (Büchner, 1983, p. 45 [ii, 4]). The Nature that falls in love with death is asleep in its kiss from life. The beings, who get their natural existence only in separating and uniting, become inert, devoid of essence, serious teasers: they unite themselves in an immobile being with one another and separate in a singular existence that passes. The adventure of meaning leads to the collapse of its network of roads, and the meshes that tear keep distanced gradually and made infinitely insignificant, infinitely insubstantial but, precisely for that reason, infinitely beautiful because of the painful, mysterious, isolated beauty of the realized ideal to the extent that is crossed out. The love of death turns the death of love, at the moment of literature, when it wants to “be at once entirely ideal and yet in the most profound sense real” (Schiller, 2015, p. 34). The reversal, forced by poetic violence, transfers the luminescent truth of this moment into a metaphor that unites reality’s most profound sense with the essential nullity of the ideal and ironizes its unity and annihilates it through the flash of its truth. Leonce’s final reply seems to restore the reversal: It’s too much! Too much! My whole being is caught in this one moment. Now to die. There can be nothing more. Newly invigorated, gleaming in beauty, Creation—​freeing herself from chaos—​reaches out to me. The earth is a bowl of dark gold, how the light is sparkling in it, overflowing its rim whence stars are pearling brilliantly upward. My lips imbibed on it: this one drop of bliss has turned me into a precious vessel. Plunge downward, holy goblet! (Büchner, 1983, p. 45 [ii, 4]). The earth is a calyx of dark gold, and the moon, to which “the golden curls have fallen on her dear face” (Büchner, 1983, p. 44 [ii, 4]), according to Lena, is a face

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of golden darkness. “How the dead angel rests on her dark pillow, stars burning like candles around her” (Büchner, 1983, p. 44 [ii, 4]). We have the same colors on both occasions, which, in our opinion, contradicts or hides each other; one of the images goes in the direction of life, the other in the direction of death. Darkness and gold are the colors of the truth-​hungry being of the world, the self-​I, the immediate mediation between the being of the differentiation everywhere, and the nothingness of the general difference. Love, as a link between earth and light, darkness, and gold, is the irrepresentable simplicity of mediation (Braun, 1988) and is subtracted from all representation—​as valid as intact in every representation. In her opinion, both the mortuary candles of the moon and the living flames of creation burn in the stars, and who sees with their eyes the beloved one, as Lena does, has to say: “do you know, Valerio, that even the most humble [sic] among human beings is so great that life is much short to live [sic] him?” (Büchner, 1983, pp. 49 [iii, 1]). Who attempts to drink from the dark gold calyx—​like the King of Thule’s cup—​promotes the exchange between its essence and the parody in the imaginary almighty consciousness of its individuality. “Lieutenant-​romanticism” (Büchner, 1983, p. 45 [ii, 4]), Valerio mocks, and, finally, Leonce agrees: “the fellow with his yellow vest and his sky-​blue pants has spoiled the whole thing for me” (Büchner, 1983, p. 46 [ii, 4]). We consider Leonce und Lena is Georg Büchner’s most modern piece. At first glance, it is a copy of the romantic literary comedy instinctively written. However, considered more closely, it is a sharp satire against the widespread pseudo-​constitutional Old Regime in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars. To this ambiguous epochal criticism is opposed the method of that language in which modernity, which is suffocating itself, continues to be explained; it touches as much as it demodulates the mean that surpasses all limits and communicates everything and, again, nothing: whose melody composes as much as it decodes. The capitalist relationship is growing in the unfolding of bourgeois society. Its hidden consequence only takes the space that it unconditionally creates for it—​to the extent that it is its valid being for the time of modernity as an unconditioned difference: its essence as a unit with its nullity—​and as a radical becoming another, in whose appearance identity and otherness separate and unite in the practical reality, and, also, as the practical reality itself. Its subject successfully meets the formula that is at its beginning. I think, and I am able, through thinking, to doubt any result of my thinking that is objectified by specific differentiation—​like this doubt that differentiates me from my infinitely multiple self-​experience. I am sure of myself, and I am one with myself in the tearing between self-​experience and self-​assurance.

176 Fues If you want to deduce your existence from your feelings or opinions […] in a way that even if that is not true is considered impossible to have it when it does not exist, then the conclusion achieved is right; because this thought […] is given to our spirit before that of our existence, and we cannot doubt we got it while we got it (Descartes, 1638, quoted in Bense, 1949, p. 246).26 To sum up: the human being has to think. This statement is not just a summary but also a quote. King Peter, Leonce’s father and unconditional Lord of Kingdom Popo, states: “man must think, and I must think for my subjects because they don’t think, they do not think” (Büchner, 1983, p. 20 [i, 2]). His Majesty, as his name already says, rests simply on the most common (universal) vowel, introduced and conveyed through the sign of an endless continuation: King Peter, Lord of Kingdom Popo and, potentially, through the marriage of his son, Lord of Kingdom Popi too. The human being has to think, and King Peter characterizes himself as the most common (universal) man in general, the human being as the most insipid and flat magnificence of his prolongation of himself through the endless novelty. King Peter has to think, but a thought that does not surpass his banal identity is no longer meaningful. Moreover, he must think for his subjects: he is the subject par excellence, the subject of the law of simplicity, the value of the change in the multiplicity of values, of concentration as well as confusion, of simplicity, and prolixity. If the essence and its phenomenon, at the bottom of its time and its society, are mixed in the only accurate determination—​the non-​separate positivity of capital accumulation—​and the essence only appears in the phenomenon to realize the appearance of differentiating, then, the self-​experience and self-​assurance become the same and are made interchangeable for the modern subject. king peter: […] When I talk so loud, I never know who it really is, I or somebody else; that frightens me. [After long reflection] I am I.—​What do you think about it, Mr. President? president [solemnly slow]: Your Majesty, perhaps it is so, perhaps, on the other hand, it is not so (Büchner, 1983, p. 21 [i, 2]; see also Mosler, 1974).27

26 27

Letter from Descartes to Unknown, March 1638. Mosler refers to Wilhelm Schulz, a Büchner’s friend, whose economic theory already shows the abovementioned trend:  “Büchner probably knew these reflections. He frequently met with Schulz during his migration in Strasbourg” (1974, p. 21). See also Grab (1979).

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The President of the State Council of Popo is right: ‘perhaps it is so, perhaps, on the other hand, it is not so.’ The difference between being and appearance, self-​ assurance, and self-​experience, which defines and individualizes the modern subject, becomes inessential simplicity, foreign to the essence, and domineering the essence, through which it disintegrates into the banal identity and the continuously confused objectivity. The individuation of the bourgeois subject is carried out in accordance with the model of capital and its accumulation and, in this way, it says goodbye to the project in which it firmly remained present; it does not take the throne away from the majesty of the human being, enthroned with the artistic period, but it overthrows it without difficulty. The comedy Leonce und Lena is the consummation of this dual movement, eloquently and with epochal accuracy. “Let language be to the thee what a body is to lovers; The body it is that divides and that unites them again” (Schiller, 1879, p. 292). In the social and historical being of modernity, essence and phenomenon are in a contradiction that excludes its perfect presence. For such a contradiction, language and speech, the oratory capacity of the human being and the human discourse, are related to each other. While human discourse extends in different ways and incomparably over the whole of the practical reality, language forms its general opposition, strictly structured: the essential determination of its corresponding determinism that bases the multiple narratives to be hidden behind them (Saussure, 2011).28 Modern literature results in and comes from that contradiction insofar as its poetry takes it as a point of indifference in its pure restlessness and dissatisfaction with itself—​and, in this sense, turns it into a device of its text. In the adventure of meaning, it does not settle for any figure of meaning in whose appearance the essence does not resonate and speaks—​ structured and textualized—​and in which the unity of presence and loss—​ indispensable for the self-​I—​has not widely overcome its work in the broken present time. It develops in the wild sea of the 19th century as if in its storms and shipwrecks it felt as comfortable as in the luminous and flat surfaces of the 18th century. It looks for the imprecise and oscillating of this reliance that is not justified in the ocean’s depths. The work of the poet must open a small world that resembles as much as possible to the big one. In this imitation of the big world, we have to see 28

“Language is nothing other than the realization of the species; i.e., the “I” is mediated with the “You” in order, by eliminating their individual separateness, to manifest the unity of the species. Now, the element in which the word exists is air, the most spiritual and general medium of life” (Feuerbach, 2012, p. 63).

178 Fues more than what, as a consequence of our weakness, we can see in the big world itself (Blanckenburg, 1965, p. 314).29 Literature, as the poetry of visualization—​as a meaning for what is expected—​ that should not be conserved, depends on the fact that its being, unconditional as a difference, is unconditionally valid for its time. With the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, the accumulation of capital became dominant in modern society, and that double unconditionality increasingly lost strength, while the organization of the society by it founded stopped at history. The negativity of the essence, which determines itself, is paralyzed in the circulation of capital that always goes through the same successive phases,30 in the abstract positivity of the capital gain, whose circular addition towards simplicity saves the contradiction between essence and phenomenon and deprives of power the practical reality for the reflection of its always already reconciled with its self-​determination. “I find in human nature a horrifying sameness, in the human condition an inescapable force, granted to all and to no one,” writes Georg Büchner to his girlfriend [Wilhelmine Jaeglé], from Giessen, in March 1834 (1986, p. 260).31 The contradiction between language and speech depends on the same deprivation of the insinuated latent power. Gradually, its point of indifference becomes the intersection between the automatic discourses in a standardized multiplicity and its hidden and naturally expansive automatism that regulates itself. When taking into account the risk of relapsing into this automation and covering up its institution, insofar as it covers it with gold, literature reminds us that human discourse is “at every moment […] an existing institution and 29 30

31

A consequence for the receiver: “we live amid the limited and finite effective reality, but as if for us it is unlimited and infinite” (Humboldt, 1986, p. 138). “The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-​power, is the first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production, is complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-​value. These commodities must then be thrown into circulation. They must be sold, their value realised in money, this money afresh converted into capital, and so over and over again. This circular movement, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital” (Marx, 1915, p. 618). Consequently, the “effete modern society,” that nobility and bourgeoisie that replaces it with the same selfishness, can be “go to the devil. Why should a thing like this walk around between heaven and earth? Its whole life consists only of attempts to dissipate its most dreadful boredom. Let it die out, that is the only new thing it can still experience” (Letter from Büchner to Gutzkow, at the beginning of June 1836 [Büchner, 1986, pp. 286–​287]).

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a product of the past” (Saussure, 2011, p. 8), but the system and the history, the language and the speech, only separate to confirm their unity differently and, in their difference, to agree with one another. The being of language in modernity is, essentially, the negativity that determines itself and negation for itself determined for the phenomenon, in the open boundary between essence and the phenomenon of the individuality that emerges in constant relationship with the meaning—​which obstinately unfolds in a strange place. Here, the self-​ determining directed asymptotically to the simple truth is silenced in the form of a divergent ecstasy of voices, each of which tells the truth without showing it. In this evident confusion of voices, the voice of self-​consciousness, which tends to the absolute identity, can perceive “the firmness of the solitary voice […] the echo of a different discourse that says the same thing, of the same discourse, saying something else” (Foucault, 1987, pp. 47, 51). “When I talk so loud, I never know who it really is, I or somebody else” (Büchner, 1983, p. 21 [i, 2]). When the self speaks so loudly as to listen to itself, it does not know who it really is, whether I or also, at the same time, another as self-​I who, as its neighbor, is always close to it, supporting it, still visible from the corner of the eye, very close without touching it at all. In short: language is valid in modernity as constitutive of meaning and its opposite and, in this constitution, is discursive. Literature is under threat of falling in the simple truth of the capital accumulation since it appropriates this duplicity as its ambiguity, discursively breaks and deforms, overwrites and deletes its necessary—​and necessarily corrupted—​ poetry of the visualization. Leonce and Lena, the genuinely smart [tiefsinnig sinnreiche] pair of lovers, are respectively betrothed by means of a metaphoric whose happiest dream and whose most extreme word is death, while Valerio, about whose destiny, character, and class one can argue so much, diverts, again and again, the vital trajectory of this loving path; he displaces it as he moves his Lord from the water in which he wants to drown, insofar as it takes the word from his mouth and makes him leave behind his decision word by word. LEONCE: Let me pass! VALERIO: I’ll let you pass as soon as you can pass muster and promise to pass the water […] LEONCE: For all I care. Man, you ruined the most beautiful suicide for me […] Now I’m not in the mood anymore (Büchner, 1983, pp. 45–​46 [ii, 4]).32 32

Valerio is an expert in detuning voices, without being a bungler in questions of detuning. “VALERIO [stands closely in front of the prince, puts his finger to his nose, and looks at him fixedly]: Yes! LEONCE [the same way]: Right! VALERIO: Do you get what I mean? LEONCE: Perfectly. VALERIO: Well then, let’s talk about something else” (Büchner, 1983, p. 16 [i, 1]).

180 Fues In this way, literature turns its text into a palimpsest whose texture reveals itself as experiencing the original determination of its time, as much as, in that way, it declares it unknown and strange, thus advancing the Foucaultian project “to analyse” the history of modernity in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-​established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject (Foucault, 1972, p. 203).33 Leonce und Lena offers an early example of this literature and its poetic approach. Valerio, its figure in two senses, shows himself and literature itself when, in the last scene of the piece, he announces to the high society the arrival of the couple of “two world-​famous automata” and adds maybe I am the third and the most curious of the two, if only I myself knew really who I am, which should be to no one’s wonderment since I myself know nothing of what I am talking about, I don’t even know that I do not know it, so that it is more likely that I am being made to talk like this, and that in fact it’s nothing but cylinders and windbags that are speaking all of this (Büchner, 1983, p. 55 [iii, 3]). Valerio does not know what he says; he does not even know he does not know what he says: he is a perfect automaton. But he knows this double not-​knowing, a knowledge that, according to that not-​knowing, could not have at all—​so it is neither a self-​I nor an automaton, and he is both at the same time—​a place in which his speeches act and the undermanned voices of this figure make him speak like cylinders and bellows. I am I. However, I do not know who I am, 33

“LEONCE:  Why Lena, I  believe that was the flight into  Paradise. I’ve been deceived. LENA: I’ve been deceived. LEONCE: Oh coincidence! LENA: Oh providence! VALERIO: I have to laugh, I have to laugh. It was truly a windfall for Your Highnesses to have fallen for each other. I hope you’ll fall on the best of times with never a falling out” (Büchner, 1983, pp. 57–​58 [iii, 3]). Has the meaning of Leonce and Lena’s life history been understood? Perfectly? Then let’s talk about something other than providence: chance. “The poet loves the chance” (Novalis, 1983, p. 449). Georg Büchner’s text follows here the structure of this veneration so precisely that the impressions of Karl Gutzkow and Ludwig Büchner about the course of the dialogue are at odds. Ludwig Büchner’s version makes Lena say the first ‘I’ve been deceived!,’ while in the case of Gutzkow Leonce keeps talking. ‘Providence’ and ‘Chance’ change their subjects without transition or intention, thus free themselves from their subjectivity and remain reciprocally confronted as little voices.

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I do not even know that I do not know it, and for all that is said about me, the following is true: ‘perhaps it is so, perhaps, on the other hand, it is not so.’ Leonce und Lena is not a comedy in opposition to a tragedy. The tragic subject, who sinks into the history and the society in the struggle for the meaning of his longing for meaning, appears here crossed out to become a blank sheet of paper without letters. The drama, which by no means produces real appetite for a liberating laughter, as Schiller demands comedy (1981; see also 1985b), is dominated by a gaiety devoid of opposition and, therefore, of mercy, to which the interiority of the I am I can be contrasted no phrase without making a fool of itself and without risking casting ridicule on its most severe intentions before its language. Self-​assurance and self-​experience lead to meaning achieving and devaluation to which the game of decline and chance preserves from its reciprocal comparison. Moreover, tomorrow, we will start the fun again with Leonce und Lena, all tranquility and joviality (Büchner, 1983; see also Honold, 2014). “Time is,” writes the mad Hölderlin, from a tower in Tübingen in one of his last letters to his mother, “[t]‌ime is precise, down to the letter, and all-​ merciful” (1984, p. 973). Literature has been the form of modern self-​confidence, the safeguard in the 19th century to put aside its distrust against itself. It introduces its reader, always, in each offer of meaning, the territory, and the offer of the general sense but, at the same time, it offers the discursive present [Gegen-​Wart] ­towards and from that presence:34 this is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves:  the fact is that other 34

“In this way, the question of whether and how literature—​and art in general—​can react to the development of postmodern society, a society that is still occupied in monopolizing its more extreme surface as exoticism coefficient of affects, is not answered. We have forgotten the art of disappearance (art […] was always a powerful lever to disappearance—​a force of illusion and denial of reality). Since we are tired of the mode of production, we have to find the paths towards an aesthetic of disappearing” (Baudrillard, 1987, p. 57). It seems that Joseph Beuys has taken this path with his sculptures of fat and tomentum [Fett-​und-​Filz-​Plastiken]. Fat and tomentum are stews of melting and defiberization, that is to say, of disappearance, in contrast to stone and metal, the stews of consistency and perseverance, production, and demonstration. The first group of stews refers to the second through evocation and allegorically. Peter Bürger, whose analysis of Beuys I am following here, in my opinion, returns the social consequence of this art to the tradition by sharing the conclusion that “it will keep being able to fulfill that retreat that allows it to face the daily world as something different” (1987, p. 211). The work of the art of the disappearance does not face the everyday world as something different but rather awakens its appetite for otherness, melts it, frays it, so as not to satisfy it (Fues, 1995).

182 Fues people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth (Blanchot, 1995, p. 307). If I had to die tomorrow, I would reorient tonight with a text that would show me, more clearly than ever before, the country I see as my life, with its indicators and through a game that makes everything present, to turn its teachings as in a burning glass, into dazzle and incandescence, in such a way that my life would appear to me strange as if I had always loved its death, and familiar as if there was no death at all.

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184 Fues Hegel, G.W.F. (1970). Fragment zur Philosophie des Geistes [Fragment on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit]. In:  Werke in 20 Bänden, Volume 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 517–​550. Hegel, G.W.F. (1971). Berliner Niederschrift der Einleitung in die Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie [Berlin Transcript of the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy]. In:  Werke in 20 Bänden, Volume 20. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 465–​519. Heine, H. (2006). Ludwig Börne: A Memorial. New York: Camden House. Henning, F.-​W. (1979). Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914 [Industrialization in Germany from 1800 to 1914]. Padeborn: Schöningh. Hermand, J. (1983). Der Streit um „Leonce und Lena“ [The Dispute on “Leonce und Lena”]. Büchner-​Jahrbuch 3, pp. 98–​117. Hölderlin, F. (1984). Sämtliche Werke und Briefe [Complete Works and Letters], Volume 2. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Hölderlin, F. (1990). Hyperion and Selected Poems. New York: Continuum. Honold, A. (2014). Uhren, Hunger und Unsterblichkeit. Das Spiel gegen die Zeit in Büchners „Leonce und Lena“ [Watches, Hunger, and Immortality. The Game Against Time in Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena”]. In: H.R. Brittnacher, and I.v.d. Lühe, eds., Enttäuschung und Engagement. Zur ästhetischen Radikalität Georg Büchners. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, pp. 181–​201. Humboldt, W.v. (1986). Ueber Goethes Hermann und Dorothea. Werke in fünf Bänden [On Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea. Works in Five Volumes], Volume 2. Darmstadt: Antiquariat Bläschke. Kim, E.-​S. (2002). Hofgesellschaft, Festivität und Aesthetik in »Leonce und Lena« von Georg Büchner [Court Society, Festivity, and Aesthetics in «Leonce and Lena» by Georg Büchner]. Marburg: Tectum Verlag. Kluge, F. (1891). Etymological Dictionary of the German Language. London: George Bell & Sons. Knapp, G.P. (1984). Georg Büchner. Stuttgart: Metzler. Martens, W. (1977). Georg Büchner, Leonce und Lena. In: W. Hinck, ed., Die deutsche Komödie. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Düsseldorf: Bagel, pp. 145–​159. Martin, A. (2014). Georg Büchner 1835 bis 1845. Dokumente zur frühen Wirkungsgeschichte [Georg Büchner from 1835 to 1845. Documents on the Early History of Action]. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag. Marx, K. (1915). Capital. A  Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Chicago:  Charles H. Kerr & Company. Mayer, T.M. (1987). Vorläufige Bemerkungen zur Textkritik von „Leonce und Lena“ [Preliminary Remarks on the Textual Criticism of “Leonce and Lena”]. In: B. Dedner, ed., Georg Büchner: Leonce und Lena. Kritische Studienausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, pp. 89–​153.

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Mosler, P. (1974). Georg Büchners „Leonce und Lena“. Langeweile als gesellschaftliche Bewusstseinsform [Georg Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena.” Boredom as a Social Form of Consciousness]. Bonn: Bouvier. Müller, F.v. (1982). Unterhaltungen mit Goethe [Conversations with Goethe]. München: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. Musset, A.d. (1910). Confessions of a Child of the Century. New York: Current Literature Publishing Company. Musil, R. (1921). „Dantons Tod“ von Georg Büchner [“Dantons Tod” by Georg Büchner]. Prager Presse (May 22, 1921). Nietzsche, F. (1968). The will to power. New York: Vintage Books. Nipperdey, T. (1983). Deutsche Geschichte 1800–​1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat [German History 1800–​1866. Citizen’s World and Strong State]. München: C.H. Beck. Novalis. (1983). Das Allgemeine Brouillon [The General Brouillon], núm. 940. In: Schriften, Volume 3. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 205–​478. Oesterle, G. (2014). Wortspiele—​Gedankenstriche und eine prosaische lakonische Frage. Georg Büchners „Leonce und Lena“ [Puns—​Dashes and a Prosaic Laconic Question. Georg Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena”]. In: H.R. Brittnacher, and I.v.d. Lühe, eds., Enttäuschung und Engagement. Zur ästhetischen Radikalität Georg Büchners. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, pp. 153–​166. Poschmann, H. (1981). Büchners „Leonce und Lena“. Komödie des status quo [Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena.” Comedy of the Status Quo]. Büchner-​Jahrbuch 1, pp. 112–​159. Raumer, F.v., and Tieck, L. (1973). Solgers Nachgelassene Schriften und Briefwechsel [Solger’s Posthumous Writings and Correspondence], Volume 1. Heidelberg: Schneider. Sanna, S. (2015). Die romantisch-​satirische Komödie „Leonce und Lena“ und die Uebung des Möglichkeitssinns [The Romantic-​satirical Comedy “Leonce and Lena” and the Exercise of the Sense of Possibility]. In: G. Wimmer, ed., Georg Büchner und die Aufklärung. Vien/​Köln/​Weimar: De Gruyter, pp. 77–​115. Saussure, F.d. (2011). Course in General Linguistics. New  York:  Columbia University Press. Schiller, F. (1879). The Poems of Schiller. Philadelphia: IG. Kohler. Schiller, F. (1981). On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature. Manchester:  Carcanet New Press. Schiller, F. (1985a). Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe [Schiller’s Work, National Edition], Volume 31. Weimar, Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger. Schiller, F. (1985b). Tragödie und Komödie (aus dem Nachlass) [Tragedy and Comedy (Unpublished)]. In: Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, Volume 21. Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger, pp. 91–​93. Schiller, F. (2015). On the Employment of the Chorus in Tragedy. Executive Intelligence Review 43 (26), pp. 33–​37.

186 Fues Schlegel, F. (1981). Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur [Fragments of Poetry and Literature]. In H. Eichner, ed., Kritische Friedrich-​Schlegel-​Ausgabe, Volume 16. Paderborn: Schöningh, pp. 83–​190. Schröder, J. (1966). Zur Erkenntnis der Dichtung [Knowledge of Poetry], Volume 2. Georg Büchners »Leonce und Lena«. Eine verkehrte Komödie. München: Wilhelm Fink. Treue, W. (1975). Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Technik Deutschlands im 19. Jahrhundert [Society, Economy, and Technology of Germany in the 19th Century], Volume 17. München: dtv. Völker, L. (1975). Langeweile. Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte eines literarischen Motivs [Boredom. Studies on the History of a Literary Motif]. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Völker, L. (1983). Die Sprache der Melancholie in Büchners „Leonce und Lena“ [The Language of Melancholy in Büchners “Leonce and Lena”]. Georg-​Büchner-​Jahrbuch 3, pp. 118–​137. Weierhausen, R. (2014). Von der Auflösung der Komödie im Zirkelschluss. Büchners „Leonce und Lena“ [From the Dissolution of the Comedy in the Circular Reasoning. Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena”]. In:  H.R. Brittnacher, and I.v.d. Lühe, eds., Enttäuschung und Engagement. Zur ästhetischen Radikalität Georg Büchners. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, pp. 167–​180. Wolfram. (1848). Das deutsche Lustspiel [The German Comedy]. Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur und Mode 33 (13), pp. 30–​31.

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Upper-​Class Female Boredom in Marriage in 19th-​Century Western Literature as a Manifestation of Socio-​Cultural Pressures Josefa Ros Velasco and Nancy Provolt Abstract The 19th-​century Western literature provides evidence of the historical and sociopolitical factors—​such as social protocols and cannons—​imposed on women that led the experience of boredom in marital relationships. In this context, the female figure is key to understanding the emotional processes taking place before and after marriage, and how they have evolved through the release of social pressures throughout the 20th century. Did past female constrictions fall through this process of social liberation? Are there lower levels of frustration and boredom after marriage than in the previous centuries? How do socio-​cultural structures influence female boredom in marriage, and how have they evolved because of Western institutional changes and improvements? What emotional impact does this transformation have for the future concept of marriage? These are just some questions that we would like to pose for discussion.

Keywords boredom –​female –​feminism –​marriage –​Western literature –​women studies

1

Introduction

The presence of boredom with marriage is currently addressed by researchers on psychology of boredom, who attempt to clarify what are its personal and environmental catalysts—​mainly to improve intimate relationships (Nichols, 1988; Reissman, Aron, and Bergen, 1993; Watt and Ewing, 1996; Tsapelas, Aron, and Orbuch, 2009; Safipouriyan et al., 2016). On the contrary, there was a time when boredom with marriage was understood as an experience only suffered by (upper-​class) women. At least, this is the view we have inherited from some 19th-​century Western oeuvres. Some magnum works of the 19th-​century

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Western literature introduced upper-​class female characters who suffered from boredom because of being trapped in their very often forced marriages to the point of ending up committing suicide. Frequently, their emotional and romantic expectations—​solidified by the tradition and enhanced through literature itself—​were unsatisfied, which, together with the socio-​cultural pressures of that period in Europe, led to the experience of an unbearable boredom to which there was no other remedy but to commit adultery, at the very beginning, to then put a definitive end to the suffering. In this approach, we will assume that literary manifestations are a means to understand the socio-​cultural reality to which they belong to analyze which were the causes of female boredom in upper-​class marriages in the 19th century. Notably, we will pay attention to those socio-​cultural oppressive factors that may result in female boredom from the reading of some of the most well-​ known novels of some main representatives of the 19th-​century Western literature. We want to talk about the work of writers such as the French Gustave Flaubert, the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or the Russian-​European Lev Tolstói, to name a few. Our central purpose is to understand such socio-​ cultural factors influencing female boredom in marriage in that period. Moreover, we aim to clarify how the emotion of boredom was used by writers, as an annoying experience, to denounce female oppression as a result of social and marital pressures. Eventually, we would like to introduce socio-​cultural factors and pressures that may be causing female boredom with marriage today to compare them with those of the 19th century and see if some of them are still present in our society, and to reflect on how female revolution throughout the 20th century has been able to eradicate some others. 2

Boredom: a Reaction to a Context

As Dr. Camilo Retana (University of Costa Rica School of Philosophy) states, in his paper “Considerations on Boredom as a Moral Emotion” (2011, p.  183, a. trans.), “when we are bored there is something of the context that we are rejecting.” In other words, we are reacting to a particular situation that makes us feel dissatisfied because there is a flow break between our need for stimulation and the environmental stimuli, according to Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory set out in his work c (1975; see also 1990; 1998; 2000). Our colleague, Dr. Christian Rafael Parreño Roldán, explains, in “Boredom and Space: Experience, Modernity and History” (2013), that boredom is experienced by the subject (S) in an environment (E) that is boring. Following Dr. Peter Toohey (University of Calgary,

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Canada), in Boredom. A Lively History (2011, p. 11), boredom “is a result of predictable circumstances that are very hard to escape […] when an experience is repeated and repeated […] like satiety. When a situation seems valueless.” This situation-​dependent boredom, according to the well-​known definition of Mikulas and Vodanovich, in “The Essence of Boredom” (1993), which generates the feeling of having nothing to do, makes our arousal system go down because of the non-​interesting, monotonous, or repetitive situations in which we are immersed. However, our boredom promotes a reaction to instigate moments of experimentation. In this regard, boredom is a signal that something in the environment is not going as expected to meet our psychological needs. It makes us aware of our relationship with the environment and tells us what we have to change to reestablish the flow. Thus, boredom involves a critical element, as Toohey (2011) points out; a profound expression of dissatisfaction, following the words of Dr. Lars Svendsen, in his well-​known bestseller Philosophy of Boredom (2005), that moves us to react. Boredom is reactive, as Dr. Jerome Neu (University of California Santa Cruz Department of Psychology) says, in “Boring from within: Endogenous versus Reactive Boredom” (1998; see also Todman, 2003). Boredom is, in this sense, and according to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, in his posthumous Description of Man (2011, p. 530, a. trans.), a combined action between “the lack of stimulation and the prohibition of falling asleep.” Not only does boredom alert of the situation that needs to be changed but opens the door to the action to promote such changes, which, according to Blumenberg and also Toohey, makes of boredom an adaptive emotion in a Darwinian sense (see Ros Velasco, 2016a, b, c; 2017a, b, c, 2018, 2019, 2020). Boredom is, in Heideggerian terms—​and as well as Parreño captures in his work (2013)—​a latent capacity, as stated in his lessons of 1929–​1930 at the University of Freiburg (1995). During the 19th century, there were many contextual reasons for people to experience this symptom, i.e., many factors involving a flow break. Boredom was a normal part of the daily life of men and women, and literature genuinely represented this (Martin, Sadlo, and Stew, 2006). Boredom was the result of massive transformations generated during the previous century. It came into play as a consequence of the bureaucratization of the standardized institutions of rationalization of space-​time. In other words, modern boredom, experienced in the 19th century, was a product of capitalism and secularization that brought the detachment of the spiritual values and the lack of sense that would be compensated, at least for the upper classes, with vain and repetitive entertainments.

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Some Literary Examples of Female Boredom in Marriage

Many writers captured the nonsense feeling and boredom in that period, and some of them focused on how this was affecting primarily upper-​class married women, who were experiencing their socio-​cultural pressures as a result of their female and economic condition. The ennui was present in works like Madame Bovary (1919), by Flaubert, Elective Affinities, by Goethe (2005), Effi Briest (2015), by Fontane, or Family Happiness, by Tolstói (2005). The pictures of an Emma, a Charlotte, an Effi, or a Maria, those women who were not allowed to have more personal goals or specific interests than being good wives, keeping a straight face and appearances, and respecting the protocols of high-​society, tell us about the situations that made them experience boredom. As well, their reactions to boredom through adultery and, when oppressive circumstances became extreme and impossible to change, through suicide to put an end to the boredom of domestic mediocrity, reflect their eagerness for exciting experiences in their boring marriages. To start reviewing a few examples, we have chosen the case of Emma Bovary. The female character of Flaubert’s novel has no other goal than getting married to a rich man, as expected and imposed by social cannons. However, after getting married, her sole purpose is to escape her boring life. She seems to be dazzled by her husband’s luxury promise and his purchase power at the very beginning. However, soon after, she falls prey to a “web of an interminable ennui,” as Dr.  Brian Tucker (Wabash College, Indiana) points out, in his work “Performing Boredom in Effi Briest: On the Effects of Narrative Speed” (2007, p. 186). Women like Emma spent time thinking of leaving their country houses to go to the city to attend social events. Women were confident that they would finally find the stimuli they expected and wished in the metropolis, with the “noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom […] where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out” (Flaubert, 1919, p. 44). However, even there did they find boredom. We can imagine them exclaiming desperately: ‘What a boredom! What a boredom!’ (1919), as Emma did, while, at the same time, saved face during boring meetings in which everybody was bored, but nobody decided on leaving. Despite Emma’s efforts to get rid of boredom through her love affairs, this silent spider had woven its web “in the darkness in every corner of her heart,” following Flaubert’s metaphor (1919, p. 44), to the point of driving her to suicide.1 1 We recommend the work of Dr. Patricia Meyer Spacks (University of Virginia Department of English) “Women and Boredom: The Two Emmas” (1989) and, to go deeper into the analysis of boredom in the novel Madame Bovary, we suggest reading Léonard Alfonso’s Doctoral

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As Flaubert, Goethe also paid attention to the situations and, overall, the oppressive factors that made upper-​class married women experience boredom. Elective Affinities is a novel to criticize the fundamentals and rationale for marriage in this period and its irrational moral basis. Goethe focuses on boredom as a sickly alienation caused by the social difficulties to release creative passions. Charlotte experiences such a taedium vitae as a result of having to cut back her feelings towards the Captain to meet the social conventions. From the very beginning, she is forced to marry Eduard, a man who holds a higher social position than her family, instead of marrying the poor man she loves. Social pressures lead Charlotte to join Eduard to ensure individual economic security and social position not to have to deprive herself of anything. Despite having a good education, she does nothing with her boring life: opportunities such as finding a job or a new man were excluded, and she had no other thing to do but to find a marriage of convenience to achieve stability, and, later, satisfy her husband’s desires to preserve it. In the same vein, Goethe stated that women were bored with their marriages because of the social pressures, in his work Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1995). He pointed out that those suddenly rich wives had to deal with the unbearable boring comfort of adapting themselves to upper-​class protocols: “I remembered this or that woman consumed by boredom in the midst of wealth and comfort” (1995, p. 322). As good wives, they had to read, go to the theater, walk around, or play the piano, prisoners of the slow married life. Boredom linked to women, love, and marriage in Goethe’s oeuvre is a demonstration of how social pressures oppressed females and made it difficult for wives to respond to their situation in the 19th century. They were able to figure out thousands of stories to escape boredom and change their condition. Authors like Goethe or Flaubert have indeed been considered misogynists, and, perhaps, what they did through their female characters was to try to show how was women personality. However, their stories, deliberately or inadvertently, tell something about those social—​and sometimes even masculine—​ pressures. Goethe acknowledged that such predefined entertainments, to which women and men—​but especially women who, as we will see later, had no other choice—​were confined, were endlessly boring: theater was boring, journeys were boring because the same was in all parts, meetings were of an unbearable nasty boredom, as he explained in From My Own Life: Truth and Poetry (1848). Nothing seemed to be able to “alleviate the endless tedium of daily

Dissertation Boredom and Irony in Madame Bovary (1966), and the Joëlle Legouhy’s one, Boredom in Madame Bovary by Flaubert and Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire (1985).

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life,” explained (1848, p. 243), for those women who were the representation of a time in which institutions managed feelings and emotions, and responses to boredom were rationalized and provided in advance without no other choice, stifling freedom for creativity and emancipation.2 We may continue with some other examples. For instead, Tolstói’s literary work was a galvanizing of emancipatory criteria, which brought him to the peak of realism. This author weaves boredom and marriage from the first page of his novel Family Happiness (2005), through the story of a couple for whom the most important thing, according to social expectations, was to support marriage instability towards the future: it is not true love or passion but money. Almost just after getting married, Maria Alexándrovna experiences the effects of being a good upper-​class wife: “before the winter ended, this sense of dejection, solitude, and simple boredom increased to such an extent that I refused to leave my room or open the piano or take up a book” (2005, p. 1). From its part, we can see how the female character of Ibsen’s theater piece Hedda Gabler (2002, p. 37) claimed, in the second act, “I’m bored! Bored! I am so bored!” Moreover, we can say the same of Effi’s boredom in Fontane’s homonymous novel (2015). Although we have no time to go deeper into these titles, we are going to focus on their implications for women. 4

Female Pressures Translated into Boredom

Boredom, during the 19th century, affected men and women but not equally. Both of them fell prey to boredom as a result of their social, economic, and cultural structures, upper-​class morals, and protocols. However, women experienced higher disorientation concerning leisure time since they were facing many other pressures because of their female condition. Goethe said that upper-​class men suffered from boredom because of the monotonous business life in the city. If men were bored despite going out to establish professional relationships with other men, what could we say of women? Charles, Eduard, von Innstetten, or Serguéi—​that is to say, the husbands—​ had well-​organized lives, most of the time, around daily hours and calendar days. They never experienced the hours were too long. Instead, on the contrary, time quickly flew as they were submerged into their duties. Women, from their part, stayed at the domestic environment, looking desperately for a distraction

2 See the well-​known work of Brednow “Goethe and Boredom” (1964) to get more fully acquainted with Goethe’s understanding of boredom.

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in which to spend money and with which filling time—​as the writer Thomas Mann says once century later, in his work Buddenbrooks (1998). According to Dr. Tucker, upper-​class women were doubly excluded: “they were allowed to participate neither in the professional world (reserved for men) nor in the world of domestical labor (reserved for servants)” (2007, p.  189). Similarly, Dr.  Meyer Spacks pointed out, in Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995, p. 174), that “no longer needed for household tasks, young women [had] no clear responsibilities and no meaningful occupation” in such a society that limited their creative desires beyond the fact of satisfying their husbands’ ones and meeting high-​class social clichés. Boredom was compensated by the risk and the danger of being found cheating their usually older, snobbish, and strict husbands, or by freeing “all the various hatreds that resulted from […] boredom” (1919, p. 107) against them, following Flaubert’s words. Perhaps suicidal responses have more to do just with literature, as Toohey said (2011), but these other reactions were means to escape boredom we may recognize today. The boredom of such oppressed women makes themselves even boring to their husbands. For example, the protagonist of Tolstói’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata told us how he had experienced his honeymoon as an abomination: “one felt awkward, ashamed, repelled, sorry, and above all dull, intolerably dull!” (2014, p. 153), as a result of spending time with his boring, and bored, wife. Also, the Swedish writer August Strindberg made his male character say, in his work Getting Married, that ladies were bored to death because they “had nothing with which to occupy her minds” (2013, p. 300). The matter is not that women had nothing with which to occupy their minds but that the socio-​cultural environment made it difficult for them to break with the many dogmas surrounding their lives. Upper-​class women in the 19th century were driven, according to the literature presented, to get married to men with whom they were not in love, still being very young, to maintain economic and social position. Their dangerous means to escape such pressures, translated into boredom, were adultery and suicide, and other kinds of tragedies and deviant behaviors. They were not allowed to ask their husbands for a divorce without losing everything and being socially ostracized. Hopefully, this generalized boredom would be, following Nick Butler et al., in “Work, Play and Boredom” (2017), the potential element of emancipation. Emancipation is perhaps the single most vital element that the upper-​class woman craved, yet few ever indeed attained. Socio-​cultural pressures, clichés, and stereotypes all played a pivotal role in the confinement of domesticity expectations for the upper-​class women of the 19th century. Women were property, not individuals who have aspirations of their own. The typical stereotype

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that women within the upper-​class were to be seen and not heard was the norm and expectation. Society’s cliché that her goals were only that of home and children much overshadowed the reality of potential that lay dormant for many. The British journalist Kathryn Hughes states, in Gender Roles in the 19th Century (2014), that the two Separate Spheres only came “together at breakfast and again at dinner.” Women were expected to not only live this way but also to prepare their children for the same. Cultural expectations were for her never to attain personal goals or education but rather to find a husband to appease both society and father. A blue-​stocking was one who “devoted too much time too enthusiastically to intellectual pursuits and were considered to be ‘unfeminine’ ” (Hughes, 2014). Therefore, drying up the ovaries and making one the unmarried type. We can see that the only pursuits suitable for the upper-​class woman were to please everyone but herself. Many upper-​class families denied their daughters entry into Cambridge when this became an option in 1869. Women writers during the period of 1880–​1910 explored themes of women populated utopias, where women were finally free to define their own culture. That was a reaction to the current culture of living according to the standard of man’s expectations. Boredom, within these spheres, opened up a world of literary genius, which persuaded scholars that the experiences of women were indeed remarkable. We even see in that period paintings images of women, focused solely on her child, never looking directly outward. The struggle to keep her identity is one addressed in The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, in which the heroine, Edner Pontellier, states, “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself” (Hughes, 2014). The point of the story is that desiring a life of one’s own does not dilute the capabilities to be a good mother. Messages, overall, were to focus on the children, the family, and anything but herself. As a result of such limitations and the constant push to keep women confined to these spheres, the divorce rate began to surge between the years of 1870 and 1920. We see literary works of that time addressing women’s rights and reforming divorce laws, which would be steps towards change, albeit little by little. We can see that boredom and the repetitious expectations were quite the driving force behind many of these steps. 5

Boredom as a Driving Force towards Emancipation

When socio-​cultural circumstances that trigger boredom are maintained over time and for a broad social group, reactions to get rid of this nuisance may lead

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to the most unexpected consequences. Boredom tells us that something in the context is going wrong. It makes us develop some strategy to promote a change and to figure out novelties, as Dr. Todman says (2003). According to Parreño Roldán (2013), boredom promotes introspective action and cognitive reevaluation. It moves us to curiosity and exploration, as an anticipatory mechanism, as Butler et al. claim (2011). Boredom is one of the most influential driving forces of human beings. At the very beginning, it paralyzes us to then becoming a violent repulsion against the situation that motivates it. And not only at the individual level. When a social group suffers from boredom due to its condition and the social pressures, this collectivity may become aware of its situation and take steps to undertake the change of paradigm in the act of rebellion against such social pressures. According to the Spanish journalist Vicente Verdú, in “Boredom Revolution” (2003, p. 1), boredom is one of the most potent social counterweights: “when that proposed by the official system does not stimulate the mood, the heart goes towards best fates.” In the same vein, the Spanish economist David de Ugarte states, in his preface to Urrutia’s work, that boredom caused by the stability of a social network that could change but does not do it, the unavoidable boredom with conservatism and security, may cause itself mutants or drive the society to try new agents and different patterns. Boredom, under certain circumstances and in particular social groups, might be the first step to change (2003, pp. 5–​6, a. trans.). Similarly, Retana points out: A boring, alienated ordinariness will likely bring collective boredom. In fact, and all critical philosophy of the 20th century agrees with that, modern ordinariness itself creates boredom. However, what if a collectivity takes note of this generalized boredom and rises against it? Perhaps this was what conducted women’s emancipation (2011, p. 186, a. trans.). Boredom, in fact, “can breed dissatisfaction with views and concepts that are intellectually shopworn, boredom can encourage creativity. Boredom may drive thinkers […] to question the accepted and to search for change,” as Toohey says (2011, p. 185). Perhaps, as the American anthropologist Ralph Linton argued, in The Study of Man (1936), all cultural advance derives from the human capacity for being bored. The victim of boredom acts in order to escape his condition—​thus

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generating, […] ‘cultural advance.’ More than one great writer has testified that his or her work originated in the experienced need to escape boredom. And if boredom entails literature as a consequence, why not bicycles, electric lights, and laser printers? (quoted in Meyer Spacks, 1995, p. 581). And why not women emancipation? That is the reason why, according to Cioran, in History and Utopia (2015), human history may be considered the result of fear of boredom. Boredom, as an inverse genealogy, establishes the present time as the starting point from which we can investigate the past (Parreño Roldán, 2013). From this point of view, history might be the result of a tension between boredom and novelty. Boredom might be understood—​we are still following Parreño Roldán (2013)—​as an analytical framework of the causality of historical moments of transformation. We might be tempted to say that human history is nothing but the attempt to avoid boredom, that is to say, in the words of Dr.  Revers (University of Salzburg), in “Anthropological Perspectives of Boredom” (1967, p. 41, a. trans.), boredom is “the shadow that drives our impulses towards our fate and history.” In line with sociologist Émile Durkheim, in The Suicide (1966, p. 45), boredom brings original “forms of conduct” that might be, following now to Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project (1999), the threshold of great deeds. Boredom, as a generalized unpleasant emotion, might have been the reason for women to be aware of their oppressed situation, especially from their role in marriage, and for driving them towards their liberation as a strong reaction. As they discard the chains of imposed socio-​cultural stereotypes and cannons, they would reduce such boredom and frustration. At this point, we can say that, in present times, stereotypes that encourage such a female role in marriage are being depleted and are less propagated by the mass media—​the living testimony of our time, as literature was during the past centuries. However, female boredom still exists in marriage. Thus, it is our firm belief that it is time to reflect on which socio-​cultural factors may be leading boredom in marriage today, and whether they are the same as in the past or not. More women today face the pressure of the second and third shifts, which ultimately leads to additional pressure within the marriage. There were over 74 million women in the workforce in 2017. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “mothers are the primary sole earners for forty percent of households with children under 18” (DeWolf, 2017). As the feminist Arlie Hochschild stated, in her book The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (2012), wives disproportionately undertook the domestic labor that makes up the second shift. Although she found this to be more accurate in working-​class

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families, it was still apparent within all classes. Upper-​class women can purchase help, but that again comes with issues of placing demands upon the working-​class woman for which she employs. With increasing numbers of women earning college degrees and working outside the home, we see women less inspired by marriage and more so by her personal goals. However, women are still facing issues of boredom within marriage in the 21st century and overwhelmingly taking on the second and third shifts, therefore, often leading to resentment and other feelings of confusion and inadequacies. Mary Mann points out in How Researching the Science of Boredom Prepared Me for Marriage (2017, pp. 776–​777), that boredom “contributes to creativity.” However, this is not always a positive, as we must analyze what does boredom inspires one to do. Does it propel one into infidelity? Does the desire to go outside our expected daily margins become a reason when dealing with never-​ ending shifts of life, such as the upper-​class woman of the 19th century? Are we still confined to the home and societal expectations, yet in a different form? Experts like Mann believe that to say one is bored within the confines of a relationship is the kiss of death. According to psychologist Adam Phillips, in his post On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1998), “there’s the possibility of hurting the other person’s feelings, for one thing—​nobody wants to be perceived as boring and many of us worry that we already are. It’s a common adult fear.” Perhaps, we must address the expectations of roles within the marriage in the same way that experts agree we must address the very issue of boredom. Also, the temptation of a social media crazed society paints a picture of what life should look like but rarely mimics. Up to 90 percent of women in long-​term marriages have experienced boredom and often fantasized about affairs and experienced questions of what the future holds when the present is so unfulfilling. That brings us back to Chopin’s statement about not being willing to give up oneself, but outside work and family pressures and expectations often overload today’s woman, leaving little to no time to do just that. Even the upper-​class woman is often still very much tied to Victorian-​era expectations of keeping home and fire going while her husband is the primary wage earner. We see this same reaction to boredom and the fact that this will manifest in some action as a result, as the writers of the 19th century stated. 6

Final Considerations

The 19th-​century Western literature provides evidence of the historical and sociopolitical factors, such as social protocols and cannons, imposed on women

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that led the experience of boredom in marital relationships. In this context, the female figure is key to understanding the emotional processes taking place before and after marriage, and how they have evolved through the release of social pressures throughout the 20th century. Did past female constrictions fall through this process of social liberation? Are there lower levels of frustration and boredom after marriage than in the previous centuries? How do socio-​ cultural structures influence female boredom in marriage, and how have they evolved because of Western institutional changes and improvements? What emotional impact does this transformation have for the future concept of marriage? These are just some questions that we wanted to pose for discussion.

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Strindberg, A. (2013). Married. Auckland: The Floating Press. Svendsen, L. (1999). A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books. Todman, M. (2003). Boredom and Psychotic Disorders: Cognitive and Motivational Issues. Psychiatry 66 (2), pp. 146–​167. doi: 10.1521/​psyc.66.2.146.20623. Tolstói, L. (2004). The Kreutzer Sonata. In:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, pp. 131–​199. Tolstói, L. (2005). Family Happiness and Other Stories. New York: Dover. Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom. A Lively History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tsapelas, I., Aron, A., and Orbuch, T. (2009). Marital Boredom Now Predicts Less Satisfaction 9 Years Later. Psychological Science 20 (5), pp. 543–​545. doi: 10.1111/​j.1467-​ 9280.2009.02332.x. Tucker, B. (2007). Performing Boredom in Effi Briest: On the Effects of Narrative Speed. German Quarterly 80 (2), pp. 185–​200. doi: 10.1111/​j.1756-​1183.2007.tb00070.x. Ugarte, D.d. (2003). El futuro es un cruel amante [Future is a Cruel Lover]. In: J. Urrutia, ed. Aburrimiento, rebeldía y ciberturbas. Una aproximación a la economía desmarcada. Desde mi sillón de orejas. Un blog de El Correo de las Indias. Accessed 08/​30/​2018. https://​juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/​files/​2012/​02/​aburrimiento_​rebeldia_​ ciberturbas.pdf. Urrutia, J. (2003). Aburrimiento, rebeldía y ciberturbas. Una aproximación a la economía desmarcada [Boredom, Rebellion, and Ciber-​mobs. An Approach to the Unmarked Economy]. Desde mi sillón de orejas. Un blog de El Correo de las Indias. Accessed 08/​30/​2018. http://​juan.urrutiaelejalde.org/​files/​2012/​02/​aburrimiento_​ rebeldia_​ciberturbas.pdf. Verdú, V. (2003). La revolución del tedio [Boredom Revolution]. El País. Accessed 08/​ 30/​2018. http://​elpais.com/​diario/​2003/​09/​05/​sociedad/​1062712807_​850215.html. Watt, J.D., and Ewing, J.E. (1996). Toward the Development and Validation of a Measure of Sexual Boredom. Journal of Sex Research 33 (1), pp. 57–​66. doi:  10.1080/​ 00224499609551815.

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Men Walking into Woods. Boredom, Nihilism, and the Characters of Erlend Loe Martin Demant Frederiksen Abstract This chapter takes as its point of departure the work of the Norwegian novelist and film critic Erlend Loe. Although often satirical in their vantage point, Loe’s novels provide critical views on contemporary Scandinavian society and how people, often middle-​ aged men, grow increasingly frustrated and bored with the schedules and routines of the modern welfare state. As a recourse, the characters of several of his novels abruptly leave their daily lives and move into isolated forests to live in solitude and stillness, thus trying to escape their sensation of boredom through nothingness. In the chapter, I focus mainly on the two novels Doppler and Fakta om Finland [Facts about Finland] and unfold the traits and actions of the characters found in these. I do so in relation to recent anthropological perspectives on boredom (Musharbash, 2007; O’Neill, 2014; Frederiksen, 2017) to engage in a discussion of the relations between nothingness, meaninglessness, and boredom.

Keywords boredom –​ meaninglessness –​ nihilism –​ nothingness –​ solitude –​ stillness

1

Introduction

The background for this chapter is a discussion about the overlaps between nihilism and mindfulness that I had with my neighbor in Denmark some time ago. This neighbor is a mindfulness instructor, and, among other things, he offers silence-​retreats for men that consist of 5 days spent in the woods. Those who participate, he explained, are often people leading busy lives, and one of the main challenges they face is the process of letting go and doing nothing. They have an ingrained sensation that, since they have signed up for a course, they have to ‘get something out of it’ and achieve a tangible goal. As such, they

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_011

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were in his experience afraid to be bored, but they but they were pushed precisely towards accepting boredom and the doing of nothing. Despite apparent differences between the woods in Scandinavia, where my neighbor carries out his retreats, and the suburbs in the Caucasus, where I carried out fieldwork, there was an interesting similarity between the experience of the men walking into woods and the Georgian nihilists that I have been following during recent years, particularly in relation to the acceptance of boredom, which had been prominent among the latter group. During our conversation, it also became clear that we had both taken inspiration from the Norwegian novelist and film critic Erlend Loe. Although often satirical in their vantage point, Loe’s novels provide critical views on contemporary Scandinavian society and how people, often middle-​aged men, grow increasingly frustrated with the schedules and routines of the modern welfare state. As a recourse, the characters of several of his novels abruptly leave their daily lives and move into isolated woods to live in solitude and stillness, deliberately moving towards sensations of boredom rather than seeking to ­escape them. In her work on the experience of boredom and its relation to modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein argues for an approach to grasp “the nihilistic dynamic of the experience not ontologically but historically” and the pervasiveness of boredom “not sociologically but philosophically” (2005, p. 4). Here, I opt for a somewhat different approach, one that takes both anthropological and literary perspectives on boredom into account. Hence, in what follows, I focus on two of Erlend Loe’s novels, namely Fakta om Finland [Facts about Finland] (2002) and Doppler (2004), and unfold the traits and actions of the characters found in these, and I do so with reference to recent anthropological perspectives on boredom (e.g., Musharbash, 2007; O’Neill, 2014; Frederiksen, 2017) to engage in a discussion of the relations between nihilism and boredom. Through association, many concepts are attached to both nihilism and boredom, such as inactivity, apathy, lethargy, or meaninglessness. Indeed, the latter notion often shows up in definitions of both terms, as in boredom is the result of a ‘meaningless fit’ (Musharbash, 2007) or in nihilism being the result of a ‘crisis of meaning’ (Critchley, 1997). As argued by Peter Toohey, it may be a misleading simplification to say that boredom arose only in the 18th century as part of the European Enlightenment. It may be, he notes, that this is true for a form of existential boredom, but not boredom as such (Toohey, 2011). However, it does seem safe to say that this particular period has created a distinct sense of boredom. In discussing boredom and nihilism in relation to the work of Erlend Loe and anthropological studies of boredom, I propose here that we should not merely see the link

204 Frederiksen between modernity and boredom as a question of modernity creating experiences of boredom, but that modernity, in some instances, has also created experiences of an inability to be bored. 2

Doppler

“I’m a cyclist. And I’m a husband and father and son and employee. And homeowner. And a lot of other things. One is so much” (Loe, 2004, p. 26).1 This is how the main character Doppler describes himself. He lives an ordinary life in Norway’s capital Oslo with his family. Like many other parents from this period, he is tormented by children’s songs that get stuck in his head after they have incessantly been bursting from the TV; Bob the Builder, The Teletubbies, Pingu … Aside from this and other small annoyances, such as his wife’s constant wish to redecorate their bathroom, he does not reflect much about his daily life. That is, until he one day, after his father’s death, goes for a ride on his bike in the outskirts of the city and takes a hard fall. After the fall, suddenly everything was just woods. Moreover, I didn’t have any of the unnerving children’s song stuck in my head […] The songs were gone. And all the speculations about the bathroom had miraculously also disappeared […] Suddenly, I was no longer thinking about whether we should have Italian tiles or Spanish, or matt or gloss, or whether we should simply afford ourselves stained-​glass, something my wife of course hotly advocated (Loe, 2004, p. 27). What he is thinking about, however, as he lies wounded in the heather in the warm spring sun, is that his father is gone and always will be. And he comes to realize how in the last couple of years, I have gradually distanced myself more and more from the surrounding people. I  was disinterested at work, and probably also at home […], I found myself in an almost constant condition in which I registered that things were happening in the world, without thinking that these had anything to do with me (Loe, 2004, p. 34).

1 All passages from Doppler and Fakta om Finland have been translated from Danish to English by me.

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During the days after his fall, he stays at home and gets a sick leave from his work; his doctor tells him to rest for a week or two. As the sick leave nears its conclusion, he begins going through a stack of papers and pictures that his mother has given him after his father’s death. He finds old receipts and notes and, to his surprise, a significant number of photographs of toilets, which makes him realize that he knew his father much less than he had thought. As a consequence of this, or of the mood it created in me, or, at least, of something that had something to do with something, I packed my backpack after an impulse that seemed random, and still feels random, and went into the woods. I left a note on the kitchen table on which I, in short, wrote that I had taken a walk in the woods and did not know how long I would be gone, but that they should not expect me home for dinner. This was about half a year ago, and I have only seen my wife four or five times since (Loe, 2004, p. 36). During several passages in the book, Doppler reflects upon his former life and his reasons for suddenly abandoning it. “I have done so much. I have been so competent,” he notes at one point. I have been competent as hell. I was competent in kindergarten. I was competent in school […] I  was a competent student and got a super-​ competent girlfriend, with whom I  got a competent marriage among competent friends, after having been offered a job that was so competent that it said fuck you to all other competent positions. Later, we had kids whom we’ve raised competently, and we acquired a house that has gone through a competent renovation. For years, I  have been walking around in all this competence. I have woken up in it and fallen asleep in it. I have inhaled competence and gradually lost my own life (Loe, 2004, pp. 42–​43). However, after having left his former life and moved into the woods, he now knows that he wants to die being incompetent. He never wants to perform anything ever again. He does engage in some activities, however. Among other things, he is killing a moose to eat. He does not realize upon doing this that the moose has a young calf that ends up following him around, eventually becoming his companion. He names it Bongo. Later, he is joined by his young son, whom he tries to teach about life in the woods and the life of doing nothing. The son finds

206 Frederiksen it hard. In the beginning, he gets anxious now and then, particularly during the times of the days when he would usually be watching TV. During one such instance, Doppler and his son end up going out to try to teach Bongo to catch sticks that we throw, but he doesn’t see the meaning in it, and, truthfully, I don’t either, so we go back to the tent and continue doing nothing until we start getting bored. It is ingrained in us that we continuously have to do something. As long as one is active, it is somehow good, no matter how dumb this activity might be. We must, by all means, avoid being bored, but I have started to notice that I like being bored. Boredom is underrated (Loe, 2004, pp. 92–​93). This passage reveals a central aspect of the novel:  namely that Doppler did not leave his ‘competent’ life in Oslo because he was bored with it. He left it because the competence was suffocating him in a way that did not allow him to be bored. Doppler’s relative solitude does not last. He is eventually joined by several others who find inspiration in his project and even one who sees him as a soothsayer. “It has become much harder to do something, and it has become impossible to do nothing,” he complains (Loe, 2004, p. 136), “and I was slowly approaching the goal, which was to do nothing” (2004, p. 154). Eventually, he, his son, and Bongo pack their things and walk away, leaving Norway, to fight competence and attempt to be bored elsewhere. 3

Fakta Om Finland

In his earlier novel Fakta om Finland [Facts about Finland] (2002), Loe’s main character is once again a middle-​aged man living in Oslo. This time, he is not a family man but an unnamed city hermit. The man makes a living creating brochures, a job that allows him to work from his apartment and at his own pace. Everything he needs he has at home: a computer, a scanner, a phone, and an electric kettle. He acknowledges the downsides of working from home—​ although he is the master of his own time, he is all alone and does not have rights to sickness benefits and paid vacation, and teabags are lying around everywhere. Yet, he is content with life, I accept my life as it in time has become. It is routine and clarity […] I don’t want it to be any different. But now, I have been dreaming about

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water for several weeks, and I’m thinking: Damn it, change again (Loe, 2002, pp. 18–​19). Dreams about water, a fluid form that goes against his wish for stability, haunt the man. “We are trained to love change,” he notes to himself, “to welcome it. It is sick, and I don’t understand it” (Loe, 2002, p. 22). He has increasingly become fearful of other people and other places, and particularly of people from other places. Things grow worse as he is one day contacted by the Finnish Embassy in Oslo, who want to commission him to put together a brochure about Finland that will attract Norwegian tourists to the neighboring country. Despite his initial reluctance, and despite never himself having been to or knowing anything about Finland, he accepts the job under the pretense of being somewhat of an expert about things Finnish. Despite having to lie about his knowledge, it will allow him to work from home and provide him with a much-​needed income. Nevertheless, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to write about Finland. Not just because he barely knows anything about the country but because he comes to realize that it will be impossible for him not to write about water when describing “[t]‌he land of a thousand lakes”—​a land with water everywhere. Had it only been Belgium or Slovakia, he thinks to himself; he might have deliberately overlooked and not mentioned lakes and water, but, with Finland, one has to admit that there are around 188,000 of them there (Loe, 2002). However, he comes to learn how many woods there are also in Finland, which brings him some degree of consolation. There are small height differences and many planks of wood. Nature’s eternal wish to make everything flat has come much further in Finland than in many other countries, I note. It is flat, and there are woods, and, as a result of this, it is the perfect country to visit if one likes flatness and woods (Loe, 2002, p. 72). Unlike the fluidity and flowing of water, he finds solace in all kinds of solidity; he needs “rock-​solid facts, about Finland,” and not eternal depictions of water (Loe, 2002, p. 94). One day, sitting on a hill 700 meters above sea level, while taking a break from jogging, his female companion (who studies geology) notes how what they are sitting on used to be seabed covered in water, one can feel it on the smoothness of the mountainsides. Upon hearing this, he remembers how he, as a child, had thought the water was a layer of film, and it was as dry below this film as it was above. However, the first time he dived underwater, he realized this to be mistaken, that water was deadly, and the anxiety of this still haunts

208 Frederiksen him, makes him dream about water, thinking that what counts is keeping one’s head above water. Sitting at the top of the hill, overlooking the Oslo inlet, he can see water everywhere, “and I realize that water is in charge and that I am only an ordinary employee without any influence upon my work situation, and that I am a powerless witness to water rising” (Loe, 2002, pp. 125–​126). With this realization, everything starts to float again in his head, as in my dreams, and I don’t want it, I want stagnation, boredom, I will go as far as to say that I wish for stagnation and silence, and that is not compatible with water, or dried out seabed, it is only compatible with that which is heavy and stable and quiet, like mountainside, like the bedrock we are sitting on (Loe, 2002, p. 127).2 4

Boredom and the Doing of Nothing

In the two novels, the notions of ‘competence’ and ‘change,’ respectively, stand forth as central tropes of modern life. In some respects, these two tropes are the opposite. While for Doppler, it is the solidity of competence that is suffocating him, solidity is what the unnamed character in Fakta om Finland is clinging on to. Nevertheless, despite this, what they both long for is boredom. Doppler finds boredom to be ‘underrated,’ while the unnamed character resembles boredom to the stagnation he dreams of as a counterpart to fluidity and change. Both protagonists find boredom deep in the woods: Doppler because these are the counterparts of the competence in the city, the unnamed character because the woods serve as a counterpart to the dreaded fluidity of fjords and lakes.3 Boredom often has a bad reputation in Norway as elsewhere. At best, children are told that it is good to be bored now and then because it ‘builds character.’ However, there is a time limit to such remarks. In young adults, expressions of boredom are read as laziness as if, as children, they never learned to overcome boredom by turning inactivity into activity (Lutz, 2006). In recent anthropological studies of boredom, scholars have understood the concept of boredom as belonging to one of two categories. One relates to the upper-​class 2 Towards the end of the book, the main character is forced to face his fear of water. 3 We should note that taking refuge in nature is a widespread tendency in the Norwegian cultural context. On Friday afternoons, people flock to the forest to find peace in the family hytte [cottage] or to take long walks or, if winter, go skiing (see Rees, 2014). However, this is a temporary refuge from an otherwise busy week—​unlike Doppler, on Sundays, people return.

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boredom of the burgeoning 19th-​century bourgeoisie that, as a result of industrialization, no longer needed to work (Van den Berg and O’Neill, 2017). Classic 19th-​century literature epitomizes such depictions.4 The other relates to disadvantaged groups who, often in the wake of liberalization, experience senses of alienation and exclusion from the surrounding society due to an inability to find work or consume, thereby being temporally sidelined (Frederiksen and Dalsgaard, 2014; O’Neill, 2014; Mains, 2017). While there are central differences between these two perspectives and conditions, boredom stands forth in both perspectives as a result of having nothing to do. However, in between these two poles—​the bored bourgeoisie and the bored precariat—​there is another category, one in which we find the characters of Loe and, I believe, an aspect of nihilism. That sets up a different kind of opposition, namely between being pushed towards and stuck in or with an unwanted sense of boredom, on the one hand, and seeking out or accepting boredom, on the other hand. This juxtaposition has revealed itself in my research in the Republic of Georgia. During long-​term fieldwork among a group of young unemployed men in the coastal city Batumi, boredom stood forth as a problematic condition. Batumi was a boom-​town in terms of tourism, or, at least, that was what the then-​ government sought to turn it into. As a consequence of this, new tourism infrastructures were constructed almost everywhere, and the president and public officials alike highlighted the vast possibilities that this hoped-​for boom would entail in public speeches and television appearances. Nevertheless, although parts of the population supported this vision—​and saw themselves as being part of it—​others did not. Unable to find work, save up for an education, or start a family, most of the young men that I followed felt that they were surrounded by what many others saw as a meaningful present and future, but one that was at odds with this their own experience. There being nothing for them to do, not least during winter, the lack of opportunities and pervasive experience of boredom often led to depression or engagements with criminal activities (Frederiksen, 2013; 2014). Being bored and doing nothing, in this context, was an unnerving experience caused by circumstances beyond one’s control (see also Dunn, 2014). For the declared nihilists in the Republic of Georgia, among whom I have later conducted fieldwork, meaninglessness and boredom did not constitute a negative. Instead, both were seen as inherent aspects of life and, as I have argued elsewhere, boredom for them was not a matter of disrupted intentions

4 Examples in the works of Walter Benjamin (2002), Anton Chekov (2011), and Robert Musil (1995).

210 Frederiksen or desires but stood forth as an acceptance of the meaningless (Frederiksen, 2017), nor was it a matter of belonging to an upper class where there was nothing to do. Boredom, in this context, was liberating rather than repressive or unwanted—​it was something they allowed themselves to be. It did not entail that they deliberately sought it out regularly. The vast majority of them had regular jobs or studied during weekdays. However, whenever meeting, there was an unspoken willingness to let go and to let nothing happen, a ‘will to boredom,’ paraphrasing Haladyn (2015), or what I have referred to as a situation of joyful pessimism (Frederiksen, 2017). In some respects, both of Loe’s characters and the group of declared nihilists in the Republic of Georgia share an affinity with the Wall Street clerk in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. In short, the story is narrated by an unnamed lawyer who hires Bartleby to work in his small firm. Bartleby is initially an efficient employee, dutifully carrying out his tasks. He does not, however, help with any other tasks than copying as he ‘prefers not to.’ Slowly, this ‘prefers not to’ grows, and Bartleby ends up announcing that he no longer wants to copy either but wants to stay in the office and do no work. This fact baffles the narrator, but he is unable to get rid of Bartleby. Later, as a new company moves into the premises, Bartleby is still there, doing nothing, and, eventually, he ends up in jail. Even here, he ‘prefers not to’ do anything, even eating, which leads him to starve to death (Melville, 2016). Bartleby has often been read as a grim outlook on how boredom affects life as a “pull towards lethargy, inactivity, and death,” in the words of Daniel Paliwoda (2010, p. 166). However, despite the grim ending, others, such as Agamben, see the “I prefer not to” as an experimental event that should be read as an expression of potentiality (Priest, 2013, p. 14). Consider this also in relation to Julian Jason Haladyn’s proposition to see boredom “as a potentially positive experience of modern subjectivity” (2015, p. 5),5 and Gianni Vattimo’s reading of Nietzsche’s active nihilism as a stance of positivity and potentiality (1988) or, in the words of Bülent Diken, a form of spite (2009). There is undoubtedly something spiteful in the acts of Bartleby, as there is in the acts of a character such as Doppler, who abruptly leaves his work and his family, refusing to leave the woods he has entered. However, just saying ‘no,’ or ‘I prefer not to,’ has stark consequences, or, at least, it is often seen as having stark consequences. We are not supposed to engage with boredom or with doing nothing, and this is precisely the problem faced by the men my neighbor 5 It is notably the creative potentials Haladyn examines in terms of artistic expressions and uses of boredom as forms of resistance, one that has parallels in the nihilistic acceptance of meaningless as a basis of freedom.

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takes on retreats in the woods. What they share with the characters of Loe, and with the nihilists I have followed, is discomfort with modern life. And, what my neighbor seeks to teach them is not that they should perpetually let go of everything and continuously do nothing, but the ability to momentarily let go, to allow themselves to be bored without finding it troublesome, to now and then say ‘I prefer not to’ and take a long walk into the woods. 5

The Inability to Be Bored

Elizabeth Goodstein links boredom to modernity as it creates “experience without qualities,” which she describes as “the plague of the enlightened subject, where the skeptical distance from the certainties of faith, tradition, sensation renders the immediacy of quotidian meaning hollow or inaccessible” (2005, p. 4). This crisis of meaning is one that is found in various forms in a range of classical works, from Nietzsche’s death of God over Weber’s disenchantment in the wake of capitalism and modernity, to Sartre’s existential anxiety (Sayer 1991; Nietzsche, 1997; Sartre, 2003). As Tom Lutz has noted, “the eighteenth-​century loungers, nineteenth-​century loafers, 1920s lost expatriates, 1950s beatniks, and the 1990s slackers often described themselves as indescribably bored, as depressed, as having ‘the vapors,’ as exhausted, as beat, as downtrodden” (2006, p. 54). What these depictions share, he argues, is that they are built around a sense of mourning or loss, whether of innocence, ideals, or purpose (Lutz, 2006; see also Nicolescu, 2014). As anthropological studies have shown, boredom is often a result of particular circumstances that leave people unwillingly bored, a condition that throws the notion of boredom into a negative light and renders it a sensation that one should, by all means, seek to stay away from—​the epithets of being a loafer or a slacker are ones that should be avoided. For the characters of Erlend Loe, the exhaustion of modern life does not arise from being beat or downtrodden but from being competent or from continually having to go with the flow. From this perspective, modernity does not just cause boredom, it also causes an inability to be bored, and it is precisely this inability that the characters of Loe are confronting when walking into woods. To be sure, the actions of both Doppler and the unnamed protagonist of Fakta om Finland are extreme in the measures they take—​that is where the satirical aspect of Loe’s writing makes itself present—​but they do speak to situations that can be found in ordinary life, whether among Danish men who go on mindfulness retreats, or among nihilists in the Republic of Georgia, and to aspects of boredom that are not inherently negative.

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Benjamin, W. (2002). The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chekov, A. (2011). The Duel. New York: Melville House. Critchley, S. (1997). Very Little … Almost Nothing. Death, Philosophy, Literature. London/​ New York: Routledge. Diken, B. (2009). Nihilism. London/​New York: Routledge. Dunn, E.C. (2014). Humanitarianism, Displacement, and the Politics of Nothing in Postwar Georgia. Slavic Review 73 (2), pp. 287–​307. doi: 10.5612/​slavicreview.73.2.287. Frederiksen, M.D. (2013). Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Frederiksen, M.D. (2014). Heterochronic Atmospheres: Affect, Materiality and Youth in Depression. In: A.L. Dalsgaard, M.D. Frederiksen, S. Højlund, and L. Meinert, eds., Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality. Time Objectified. Philadephia: Temple University Press, pp. 81–​97. Frederiksen, M.D. (2017). Joyful Pessimism: Marginality, Disengagement and the Doing of Nothing. Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78, pp. 9–​22. doi: 10.3167/​fcl.2017.780102. Frederiksen, M.D. (2018). An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular. Winchester/​Washington: Zero Books. Frederiksen, M.D., and Dalsgaard, A.L. (2014). Introduction: Time Objectified. In: A.L. Dalsgaard, M.D. Frederiksen, S. Højlund, and L. Meinert, eds., Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality. Time Objectified. Philadephia: Temple University Press, pp. 1–​23. Goodstein, E.S. (2005). Experience without Qualities:  Boredom and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Haladyn, J.J. (2015). Boredom and Art. Passions of the Will to Boredom. Winchester/​ Washington: Zero Books. Loe, E. (2002). Fakta om Finland [Facts about Finland]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Loe, E. (2004). Doppler. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Lutz, T. (2006). Doing Nothing. A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mains, D. (2017). Too Much Time: Changing Perceptions of Boredom, Progress, and the Future among Young Men in Urban Ethiopia, 2003–​2015. Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78, pp. 38–​51. doi: 10.3167/​fcl.2017.780104. Melville, H. (2016). Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Musharbash, Y. (2007). Boredom, Time, and Modernity:  An Example from Aboriginal Australia. American Anthropologist 109 (2), pp. 307–​317. doi:  10.1525/​ AA.2007.109.2.307. Musil, R. (1995). The Man without Qualities. Basingstoke/​Oxford: Picador.

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Nicolescu, R. (2014). The Normativity of Boredom: Communication Media Use among Romanian Teenagers. In:  A.L. Dalsgaard, M.D. Frederiksen, S. Højlund, and L. Meinert, eds., Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality. Time Objectified. Philadephia: Temple University Press, pp. 139–​153. Nietzsche, F. (1997). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. O’Neill, B. (2014). Cast Aside:  Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post-​Communist Bucharest. Cultural Anthropology 29 (1), pp. 8–​31. doi: 10.14506/​ ca29.1.03. Paliwoda, D. (2010). Melville and the Theme of Boredom. Jefferson/​London: McFarland and Company. Priest, E. (2013). Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure. New York/​London/​New Delhi/​Sydney: Bloomsbury. Rees, E. (2014). Cabins in Modern Norwegian Literature. Negotiating Place and Identity. Madison/​Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Sartre, J.P. (2003). Being and Nothingness:  An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London/​New York: Routledge. Sayer, D. (1991). Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. London/​ New York: Routledge. Toohey, P. (2011). Boredom. A Lively History. New Haven/​London: Yale University Press. Van den Berg, M., and O’Neill, B. (2017). Introduction:  Rethinking the Class Politics of Boredom. Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 78, pp. 1–​8. doi: 10.3167/​fcl.2017.780101. Vattimo, G. (1988). The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-​Modern Culture. Oxford: Polity Press.

pa rt 3 Boredom and Creativity

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­c hapter 10

The Art of Boring (Oneself) Jorge Andrés Espinoza Cáceres Abstract The following chapter attempts a hermeneutic-​phenomenological interpretation of the sense of boredom as a fundamental possibility to comprehend our relationship with the world, according to Heideggerian analyses contained in its course of Freiburg of 1929–​1930, entitled Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik [The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics]. We will show that, precisely from the assumption of a particular form of boredom, it can be possible to resignify the world, and from this, to open a creative possibility, specifically between the understanding ajar from the boredom by something and the creation of attunement.

Keywords artistic creation –​boredom –​creative mood –​Heidegger –​Kierkegaard

1

Introduction

In the last decades, mainly since the 50s, the integration and revaluation of the different emotional states or feelings have systematically grown in the West. In this way, scholars have recognized the fundamental relevance of the emotive dimension in most of our areas of existence. However, together with this integration and recognition, there has been an invisibilization process of certain emotions that do not respond adequately to the current different socio-​economic models, especially the emotions that restrict our productivity-​ activity. Emotions such as tedium, boredom, or melancholy, among others, have been stealthily marginalized.1 According to this interpretation of the human emotions of our time, this chapter attempts an integration and resignification

1 Paradoxically, the recognition of some of these emotions has served primarily as a complement to our productivity (Lipovetsky, 1989).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_012

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of the emotion of boring (oneself) from a phenomenological-​hermeneutical perspective based on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995) by Heidegger. Thus, it attempts to highlight some of its senses and its potential relationship with (re) creation. For that, we will structure this exposition in different stages. First, we will clarify the hermeneutic-​phenomenological method to consider basic moods or attunements [Stimmungen]. Secondly, we will recognize formally the fundamental features of any mood. From this formal recognition, we will go on to review the fundamental mood of boredom and its first modalities, boredom by something. Then, from the recognition of these modalities of boredom, we will establish the relationship of this boredom and its correlative temporariness, with its extensive comprehension of the world and a possible creative mood. 2

The Hermeneutic-​Phenomenological Method to Consider Attunement Moods [Stimmungen]

In this way of signification about the multiple senses of boring (oneself) and its potential relationship with the (re) creation, we will first explain the place and sense that occupies the hermeneutic-​phenomenological method within the thought of Heidegger from its Lesson of Marburg of 1929–​1930—​thus, gaining access to an understanding of the original2 sense of attunement,3 specifically, from Dasein’s boredom.4 We also warn that Heidegger’s discourse in this lesson responds to a general task:  to awaken boredom as a fundamental attunement to open the possibility of an understanding of the metaphysical concepts of World, Finiteness, and Solitude.5 We will distance from this main task in which this seminar is registered to rehearse another possible comprehension of the boring as a disposition for the creation, hardly suggested in this Lesson (Heidegger, 1995 [§ 4]). Complementarily, we will exceed the explicit 2 Origin refers to the last and fundamental soil from which appears all entity, object, thing, or feeling of our being in the world as human beings. 3 According to the terminology of this lesson, we will use the term attunement to translate Stimmung, a concept that refers—​albeit more broadly—​to the emotional state of the human being. For greater clarity on this concept, see the second section of this essay. 4 Dasein is Heidegger’s substitute term for ‘human being.’ He introduces it to stay clear of all objectifying tendencies. For a precise explication of the term and its adoption into English-​language analytical philosophy, see John Haugeland’s posthumous work Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger (2013, especially 76–​90). 5 For Heidegger, this awakening—​as a fundamental attunement of boredom—​is also likewise related to awakening our authentic and occult existence as Dasein: temporality.

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content of this lesson to explain, in general, what is the phenomenological-​ hermeneutic method, since it does not clarify or thematize specifically this method under these conceptual terms. We will go briefly to some significant sources in which Heidegger—​and other commentators—​have treated and defined the meaning of this method. To begin, we would like to emphasize that the phenomenological method responds to a pretension of access and analysis of what shows itself of our experiences, feelings, and entities of the world. Hence, we can understand the ‘phenomenon’ as what shows itself in itself, i.e., both our attunements and the physical, imaginative, or ideal entities.6 This claim was already present in Husserl’s phenomenological studies,7 but the distinct approach that Heidegger added to this claim was to recognize that the experiences, the moods, or the entities are already always and necessarily enrolled in a horizon of meaning: the world. A study on the shows itself or the entities of our experiences must first assume the understanding of this world horizon as the origin from which everything shows. This difference, added by Heidegger at the beginning of the 20th century, will allow a change in the comprehension of the mood’s being, as well of all the entities, contained in the term of hermeneutics, because this new comprehension of the phenomenological method will try to prolong the being of all show itself, according to its circumstance in the world, preserving the temptation to reduce them to theoretical-​decontextualized characteristics. The decisiveness of this new method, then, is to recognize the meaning of every phenomenon—​our experiences or entities—​shows itself according to a specified circumstance or context. However, why we should try to respond to the being of the entity according to their worldly context?8 On the one hand, because phenomenology, following Husserl’s words, intended the access not only to the different modes of the what shows itself in itself

6 Show itself in itself is the English translation for the German expression sich zeigen. For a better analysis, see Heidegger (2010, § 7). 7 Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859–​1938) was the founder of Transcendental Phenomenology and, through it, the Phenomenological Movement. Concerning the lack of prejudices of the phenomenological method, see the following quotation of Husserl:  “an epistemological investigation that can seriously claim to be a scientific must, it has often been emphasized, satisfy the principle of freedom from presuppositions. This principle, we think, only seeks to express the strict exclusion of all statements that do not permit a comprehensive phenomenological realization. Every epistemological investigation that we carry out must have its pure foundation in phenomenology” (2001, p.  177). For Husserl, this means the essential intuition executed based on singular intuitions of exemplary experiences. For Heidegger, this is the referral to our situation, and, with it, to our concrete world horizon. 8 Worldly, i.e., as referring to the world horizon.

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of the experiences or entities but to the original being of these, i.e., in its mundane context. On the other hand, because Heidegger (2000) attempted to recognize and assume the originally pre-​reflexive attitude of life, i.e., the non-​theoretical position from our existence, which, according to their first analyses, is nothing more than to sympathize with life. In this way, phenomenology, and, with it, the philosophical exercise, pretends to assume this pretheoretical position of our life, that is to say, to assume “the original intention of the authentic life in general, of the original attitude of the living and the life as such, of the absolute sympathy with life that is identical with living itself” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 92). We can understand the phenomenology as what shows itself in itself from both our feelings and the objects of the world, i.e., every entity from the individual existence of each Dasein in its corresponding horizon, and the hermeneutic, as the correlative worldly understanding of this shows itself. Returning to the seminar in question, it seems that an appointment that collects and synthesizes what we just pointed out about the hermeneutic-​ phenomenological method, without using these words, is the following (Heidegger, 1995, p. 91): It is not a matter of concocting a region of lived experiences, of working our way into a stratum of interrelations of consciousness. We must precisely avoid losing ourselves in some particular sphere which has been artificially prepared or forced upon us by traditional perspectives that have ossified, instead of preserving and maintaining the immediacy of everyday Dasein. What is required is not the effort of working ourselves into a particular attitude, but the reverse: what is required is the releasement of our free everyday perspective-​free [Gelassenheit des alltäglichen freien Blickes], from psychological and other theories of consciousness, of the stream of lived experience and suchlike. The decisiveness of the method is to keep us in our existence and establish a study of the attunements as how we are attuned. However, what does it mean to keep ourselves in our existence? Is it possible not to be in our existence? What this quote points out is the immediacy and freshness of our existence, in its most sincere and spontaneous daily life, without mediation or misrepresentation, that is to say, the recognition, first, of the origin of all ‘show itself’: the world. That is why Heidegger points out that “what is required is the releasement of our free everyday perspective-​free, from psychological and other theories of consciousness, of the stream of lived experience and suchlike” (1995, p. 91). The accent, then, falls on our free everyday perspective-​free.

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Nevertheless, likewise, Heidegger warns us about a danger that he has been long working in his first courses of Freiburg, which corresponds to the possible attitudes or inheritances that distort not only the essence of the attunements but also of our existence. Although this seminar does not address this fear explicitly, it seems that it underlies some analyses that Heidegger rehearses about the essence of the attunements. For now, we retain the warning of Heidegger on the possible misrepresentation of the attunements. We will show, in the following paragraph, how these can be distorted mainly according to the theoretical-​reflective attitude. 3

Formal Characterization of Fundamental Attunements [Grundstimmungen]

Carefully established what means the hermeneutic phenomenological method, now we apply it to formally characterize the fundamental attunements according to the approaches of Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–​1930.9 In doing so, we will proceed, first, to show, in this section, what are the attunements in general10 so that we can confront, in the following section, these formal characteristics with a particular attunement: the boredom [Langeweile]. Heidegger proposes, in this lesson, that there are fundamental attunements and others that, in broad terms, ‘ascend’ from the depths of our existence to shows itself in our surface as superficial attunements. Serve the reader to have the following characterization. We all experience, in the course of our daily life, different types of feelings. We oscillate between joy, sadness, amazement, love, hatred, or even indifference. We sail in the sea of existence by feeling. Precisely, this is the first thing we ask when we start a conversation: what’s up or how are you doing. Just behind this question lurks a curious knowledge: that we always feel in such or such a way,11 i.e., that our existence is always and necessarily attunes.12 In this prolific range of feelings that come to us, we travel 9 10

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Formal, as the essential structural characteristics of something, in this case, of the attunements. We emphasize that Heidegger distinguishes between fundamental and non-​fundamental attunements without clearly specifying this distinction, especially regarding the clarification of the non-​fundamental attunements. We take risks, in this way, that the formal characterizations of the fundamental attunements apply, likewise, to the non-​fundamental, as happens—​following Heidegger—​with the attunement of boredom. Remember that the Befindlichkeit—​affective disposition—​is a Dasein’s existential, along with the Verstehen, understanding (Heidegger, 2010 [§ 29–​34]). “An attunement is a way, not merely a form or a mode, but a way [Weise] in the sense of a melody that does not merely hover over the so-​called proper being at hand of man, but

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our lives in different depths of being. Our existence takes place from the more contingent and ephemeral, as a transient joy or a small annoyance, to the most uncertain tempers that are beating in the depths of our being, passing through innumerable ‘intermediate’ tempers. Our lives unfold in the different ‘levels’ between these two extremes. Right there, when a deep feeling happens, we confusingly feel that our authentic being is Present. On the contrary, where a passing joy comes to us, we gradually forget it as if we had not been genuinely affected. It is according to the recognition of this diversity of shades that nuance our existence that Heidegger uses the term attunement [Stimmung], and not the terms feeling and emotion. These last two terms can either emphasize their stable and verifiable dimension in physic-​chemical properties and their character of being internal processes of our existence. On the contrary, the term ‘attunements,’ employed by Heidegger, intends to add to its meaning the most ephemeral and imperceptible state of our existence. We reiterate, then, that most of the time, we only notice ‘superficial’ attunements such as joy and sadness. Less noticeable would be a slight fear or a gentle calm sliding in. We never cease to be attuned. When sadness attacks us, or when joy moves us, we are always previously attuned. It is not that, from the experience of a specific attunement, we have been attuned and had previously remained an-​attuned. On the contrary, we always move in an indeterminate attunement that is particularly difficult for us to grasp, and that seems to be something completely indifferent, but in no way is it for our existence. 3.1 Ascertainment of Fundamental Attunements In recognizing, then, the attuning of our existence, the first problem that Heidegger points out for a characterization of the essence of all attunements is its objective ascertaining. In this sense, Heidegger writes (1995, p. 60): Is mood in general something we take note of as something at hand [vorhanden], just as we notice, for example, that some people are fair and others dark? Is mood something that one simply has or does not have? […] Perhaps such a thing as the fundamental mood we are seeking is precisely something that cannot be ascertained in this way by an inquiry. The difficulty of attunements’ ascertainment Heidegger highlights, aims, preventively, to its possible transformation and the loss of its originative senses

that sets the tone for such being, i.e., attunes and determines the manner and way [Art und Wie] of his being” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 67).

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from two possibilities: concerning the specificity of the essence of the attunements, and the assumption of an equivocal attitude, when it comes to clarifying the essence of the attunements. We can quickly warn the first when the ascertainment of an attunement—​ for example, that I feel cheerful or sad—​does not move at the same level as the ascertainment of something at hand [vorhanden]—​of a stone or a book.13 Thus, we can agree that the observation of the attunements is not comparable to the ascertainment of the entities at hand. Although there is a sort of observation of the attunements, this does not move at the same level as when we verify such properties of one physical object. For example, when we remember that yesterday, at a precise moment and in the face of a particular situation, we got attuned with cheerfulness, something like an ascertainment of the attunements arises. It was at  that  time and not another when such an object and no other was the cause of my astonishment; in such circumstances and not in others, I felt this way. Curiously, we ascertain that it was yesterday and not today, and that was at that time and with those people. In this sense, we can recognize that there is something like a very peculiar ascertainment of the attunements that does not move at the same level of physical objects. However, this first warning plunges its roots into a more hidden truth (Heidegger, 2000 [§ 20]) that responds to the second possibility of the sense of the ascertainment, namely, that every attunement is potentially subject to a theoretical misrepresentation of its senses. According to the assumption of some attitudes that respond to a process of objectification—​to its transformation into abstract and decontextualized properties, possible for any entity, even for physical objects—​14 thus Heidegger warns us of the traditional possibility of transforming the attunements into objects, losing this way its essence. Therefore, Heidegger’s warning regarding the attunement’s ascertainment refers to the unjustified equating of the essence of any possible

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Let us remember the terminology difference between be-​there [Da-​sein] and something at hand [Vorhandensein]. The first term refers solely to the essential constitution of the human being, to its temporal character, as the only ‘entity’ that ‘is its there.’ On the contrary, the second term refers exclusively to a way of being of the [innerweltlich] with-​in-​ the-​world entities—​physical objects—​as ‘pure presence.’ We will generally use Da-​sein as a synonym for being human but, at certain times, we also translate Da-​sein as being-​there to accentuate the temporal character of the action. For example, when we are not-​there in a certain situation. We never refer with be-​there by the mode of the with-​in-​the-​world entity of the Vorhandensein unless we highlight explicit it (Heidegger, 2010 [§ 16–​17]). For details, see the processes of objectification and formalization in Espinoza Cáceres (2010) and Heidegger (1988, [§ 11–​13]).

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attunements with other ontologically different entities15—​such as with an object physical—​and its objectivation—​and, therefore, of the transformation of its authentic show itself and its original sense in a world horizon. Consequently, from a hermeneutical-​phenomenological perspective, the attunements are introduced, first, as structural states of our existence—​as conditioners of our comprehensibility of the world—​and, only secondarily, as the objective and ascertainable state of things. That is why Heidegger, in the wrongness of this term, introduces another concept to the proper treatment of attunements, namely, the awakening: “[t]‌hus we shall not speak at all of ‘ascertaining’ a fundamental mood in our philosophizing but of awakening it. Awakening means making something wakeful, letting whatever is sleeping become wakeful” (1995, p. 60). The Awaking the Attunements and Its Relationship with the Being Out [Weg-​sein] of the Dasein What does it mean to awaken attunements? Does it mean waking up somewhat asleep, as when a human being is awakened from a dream, or, because of the particular character of the attunements, this awakening responds to a particular sleeping method? After exposing the inadequacy of the terms of conscious and unconscious, to try to clarify the terms of waking and sleeping of the attunements,16 Heidegger highlights the particular presence that the attunements have, according to his being and not being there. He writes: the temper of mind “is something that is simultaneously there and not there” (1995, p. 60). To clarify this peculiar condition of being of the attunements, Heidegger introduces the term Weg-​sein that responds to a peculiarity of the being of the Dasein, namely, this particular way of being and not being there, at the same time. For example, when we are there in a class, or when we are there in a conversation with a friend, we cannot ‘be-​there,’ at the same time. We feel absent from the activity itself that surrounds us without being asleep or unconscious. Curiously, most of the time, we are peculiarly aware of that not-​being-​there in the middle of the conversation or the class. We say: ‘I feel out of the conversation, of the class, of such a daily situation.’ 3.2

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I understand ontological as the meaning of being of the entity, i.e., as a difference of being between different entities. One of the arguments with which Heidegger rejects this clarifying relationship between waking and sleeping of the fundamental moods, with the conceptual binomial of conscious and unconscious, is that the sleeping itself behaves, in turn, a peculiar form of consciousness, namely, Sleep. From this perspective, it becomes problematic to equate waking up with consciousness and sleeping with unconsciousness (1995 [§ 16]).

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Precisely, this not-​being-​there of ourselves does not move in an area of unconsciousness that progressively gets to consciousness. We are ‘not-​there’ in the middle of the conversation consciously. That not being-​there that we usually understand as an absence, is what Heidegger broadly understood as the being-​away: “this not-​being-​there is nonetheless a being-​away [Weg-​ Sein]” (1995, p. 63). According to him, we are always moving in this being-​ out, not in such a way that we decide only ‘being-​out’ of such a situation, that we propose to be-​out and not sometimes, but, primarily, we fall into it, and we are aware of our absence thanks to it. The essential, according to Heidegger, is the possibility of being-​out as something we take in our hands. The unreasonably decision of being or not outside does not arbitrarily occur, but “man however must be there in order to be able to be away, and only so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an ‘away’ ” (1995, p. 64). We can affirm, then, that being-​there and not being-​there should not be confused with the absence and presence of the attunements, nor with the way of being of the Dasein. From a chapter, perhaps this one, we can talk about physical properties that are or not present: the extension, the typography, the language. On the contrary, in the preeminent case of the Dasein and its attunements, we do not refer to substantial properties that are present or not in it when we say it is there. It is not that when the Dasein is not-​there, it is faded and cease to be at all; quite the opposite, precisely this not being-​there of the Dasein is a proper characteristic of its being, which is not comparable to the presence or absence of a substantial property of an object. The ways of being of the Dasein, its being-​out, and its attunements, are only possible necessarily from our being. Thus, it is understandable that Heidegger writes: Yet what we have designated as being there [Dasein] and being away [Wegsein] are something in the Being of Man. They are possible only if and so long as man is. Being away is itself a way of Man’s being. Being away does not mean: not being at All. It is rather a way of Da-​sein’s being-​ there (1995, p. 64). According to this, the Dasein has to be necessarily there to be able to be outside. Only from his being-​there, it opens the possibility of his being out. Thus, we can understand the attunements’ modes of being in the light of the Dasein’s mode of being according to his being-​out, so as not to distort its most authentic (or proper) essence. So, finally, Heidegger writes (1995, p. 61):

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To awaken an attunement cannot mean simply to make conscious an attunement which was previously unconscious. To awaken an attunement means, after all, to let it become awake and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we achieve the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is thereby precisely destroyed, or at least not intensified, but weakened and altered. In short, we have agreed that the ascertainment of attunements is not so easy. According to that, we have clung to the council of Heidegger: awaken the attunements. Here, awakening means to let be an attunement that used to be asleep. Concerning this awakening, we have also reached an essential characteristic of the attunements, namely, their character of being and not being there simultaneously, which, in no way, should be confused with a mere being present or absent from specific properties of an entity. From this treatment, we have been able to clarify that not being-​there is not the excluding opposite of existence; it is not that we do not exist when we are out; precisely there, in our being-​out, our existence continually runs. Likewise, it is not that the not-​ being-​there of the attunement is an absence of existence but that it is, in itself, a mode of presence that we are just trying to explain. 3.3 Provisional Characterization of the Attunements from Everyday Life Let us stop, for a moment, to look at the everyday situations of our existence that attune us. Notably, the situation adduced by Heidegger is the following: “a human being we are with is overcome by grief” (1995, p. 66).17 What is happening here? According to Heidegger, the man affected by a certain sadness is enclosed: he turns to a particular state inaccessible to us, without showing a roughness in it. Only this: it becomes inaccessible. We continue there with him, but, somehow, our being-​there with him is modified. In this way, we are there with him in the same way as ever, and yet our being-​together is different. This difference that rises from the sadness that occurred in him does not modify only our doing with the ‘things,’ our way of applying to them, but this modification is rooted much more deeply in us, modifies how we are together. What does it mean that the sad man becomes inaccessible, according to the Heideggerian interpretation? Mainly, that the way he is with us, and how we 17

Heidegger collects in the text, in addition to this one, other possibilities for attunement. For this, it plays with the German word Stimmung in its significant meaning of environment. It is possible to play with the significance of the German word attunement or environment as the German expecience contains them.

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are with him has been modified. We are both introduced in his state, without us being sad. Our being-​there with him is now different, we find ourselves attuned in another way. Even if sadness does not invade us properly, we say: we feel sorry for him, or we feel sad for him, or even indifferent to their sadness. One way or another, our being-​there, our ‘being one with another,’ has been modified since the arrival of sadness. Curiously, the sadness settled in him, ‘is’ in him and ‘is’ in us simultaneously, but not in the same way, so that we are both modified in our being-​there. This fact surprisingly allows us to say that the sadness that occurred in him ‘is,’ to some extent, in him as ‘is’ in us. Let us underline:  this sadness that occurred in him does not occur in the same way in us. It is not that sadness is equivalent to both of us; quite the opposite, as noted above, ‘his’ sadness is what can awaken in me the most different attunements. Nor must we understand that sadness is there loose, floating like a cloud, something like an abstract entity in which we introduce ourselves. We must not deny the different entities, objects, people, or circumstances: the ‘provocation’ of the attunement on us. Moreover, we must not equate the sadness of someone who has lost a loved one with the attuning aroused in us by his loss. The main thing here is that the attunements modify our way of being-​there, which allows us to say that the attunement is present above all, that it is not in there in the interior of the sad man, nor that it is outside, but that it rises above all that steps out in front. Therefore, we can argue that the attunement is not an entity that happens in the interiority or exteriority of the human being, in the soul as an experience, but it can be understood as: “the way in which we are together” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 66)—​something that determines our being-​with-​another. That is not to say we can reduce the attunements only to how we are together as if we were attuned only in the company of someone else, and not attuned in solitude. What is essential here is the attunements’ demystification as a concomitant phenomenon outside or inside a subject for the subsequent incorporation of the attuning as the fundamental way of existence. According to the following formal characterizations obtained so far from the attunements, we can agree, therefore, that the attunement is not an entity—​ nothing further from understanding what a mood of encouragement is—​but the fundamental way as existence is existence. We live attuned. Only from this attuning, we can cope with different ‘attunements.’ From this follows that, contrary to the traditional notion of attunements understood as the most inconstant, ephemeral, and personal, attunements appear as what gives consistency and possibility to existence. The attunements are then the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves in one way or another. Only as long as our existence is attuned, we can vibrate in different tones. It is never the concomitant

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phenomenon that accompanies our thinking and way of acting. On the contrary, only to the extent that we live attuned can we be affected by the entities. 4

The Fundamental Mood of Boredom and Its First Modalities: Becoming Bored by Something

Now, in the next section, we will analyze the attunements of boredom according to the formal characteristics described above. Since we will distance from some of Heidegger’s analyses developed in his seminar, we will expose only the first modality of boredom exhibited by Heidegger, becoming bored by something, to establish a possible relationship between this boredom and a creative attunement.18 4.1 Becoming Bored by Something Returning to the lesson abovementioned, and after a series of warnings about the difficulties presented by an analysis of the attunement of boredom,19 Heidegger proceeds to explain the implicit relationship that the term—​in the German language—​contains between boredom and time.20 Unfortunately, 18 19

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In this seminar, Heidegger establishes three modalities of boredom, namely, becoming bored by something, being bored with something, and then analyzes the last and most complex modality of boredom, it is boring for one. Heidegger briefly warns about the different difficulties that the main approaches commonly used to account for boredom deal with—​from the point of view of a subject that suffers the effect whose cause is an object, that is, under the relational prism cause-​ effect—​in the manner of a transfer (metaphor) from a subject to an object, bordering on idealism, and, finally, of a reluctant subjectivism, as something intra-​mental. We reproduce the first conclusions obtained so far by Heidegger on these problematic interpretations: “[1)] what is boring is not so called simply because it affects boredom in us. The book is not the outer cause, nor is the resulting boredom the inner effect. [2)] Therefore, in elucidating the facts of the matter, we must disregard the cause-​effect relation. [3)] The book must nonetheless make itself felt, not, however, as an inducing cause, but rather as that which attunes us. This is where the question lies. [4)] If the book is boring, then this thing outside the soul has in itself something of the possible, perhaps, even suppressed attunement that is in us. Thus, although it is inside, the attunement plays around the thing outside at the same time, and indeed without our transferring any induced attunement from within us outside onto the thing. [5)] The thing can ultimately be boring only because the attunement already plays around it. It does not cause the boredom, yet nor does it receive it merely as something attributed by the subject. In short: boredom-​and thus ultimately every attunement is a hybrid, partly objective, partly subjective” (1995, p. 87–​88). The term boredom in German language, Langeweile, means a long time. “Boredom, long time: especially in Alemannic usage, means ‘to have long time’ […] Boredom—​whatever

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this linguistic phenomenon is unrecognizable in the English language, but what Heidegger wants to point out is that even the very term of boredom already contains a relationship with time. After this linguistic analysis, Heidegger points out that boredom is ‘something’ we reject; that is, whenever this attunement emerges in us, a need to immediately and spontaneously avoid it arises, and, to avoid it, we resort to the pastime. If boredom is something that we are fundamentally opposed to from the very beginning, then it will originally manifest itself as that to which we are opposed wherever we are opposed to it, wherever we drive it away—​ whether we do so consciously or unconsciously. This occurs wherever we create a diversion from boredom for ourselves, where we in each case pass the time in such and such a way and with this intent (1995, p. 90). Therefore, Heidegger will use pass the time as a guiding thread to identify the emergence of boredom, especially to analyze boredom in its first form, the becoming bored by something, because—​it is essential to highlight this—​ boredom is something we spontaneously reject. For the case of this first form, Heidegger will introduce the example of a train station, where we have to wait four hours until the next train departs (1995, p. 93): We are sitting, for example, in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway. It is four hours until the next train arrives. The district is uninspiring. We do have a book in our—​rucksack, though—​shall we read? No. Or think through a problem, some question? We are unable to. We read the timetables or study the table giving the various distances from this station to other places we are not otherwise acquainted with at all. We look at the clock—​only a quarter of an hour has gone by. Then we go out onto the local road. We walk up and down, just to have something to do. But it is no use. Then we count the trees along the road, look at our watch again—​exactly five minutes since we last looked at it. Fed up with walking back and forth, we sit down on a stone, draw all kinds of figures in the sand, and in so doing catch ourselves looking at our watch yet again—​half an hour—​and so on.

its ultimate essence might be—​shows, particularly in our German word, an almost obvious relation to time, a way in which we stand with respect to time, a feeling of time” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 80).

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Pay attention to the pastime alluded to by Heidegger, as the situation indicates. We can study the railways’ guide, take out a book and look at it for a while, or count the trees on the road. We can come and go about different pastimes in this peculiar wait. Precisely, this is the idea of the situation referred by Heidegger to illustrate, from a banal and daily perspective, the different ways of spending time. The exciting thing about this example is that we are stuck in this waiting situation. We pass the time until the next train arrival.21 Concerning this example, Heidegger will distinguish between boredom and waiting since, in waiting, a prolific range of attunements, such as anguish, anxiety, impatience, or pure tension, may flourish. Just in the waiting is where these different modes of attuning flourish, and not precisely the attunements of boredom. That is why Heidegger writes: “[b]‌eing bored in something is not in spite of everything a waiting for something […] Boredom is not itself a wait. Furthermore, not all waiting is necessarily boring” (1995, p. 94). Therefore, Heidegger will conclude that not all waiting is boring in itself, but only this waiting in particular in which our different pastimes to fight this oppression of time hides a relationship with boredom. But, what is decisive in this first example consists, in my opinion, of: reaffirming this form of boredom is an attunement we fundamentally reject, which implies, in turn, to recognize the close relationship that exists between boredom and time, and which, in turn, implies reaffirming the hidden relationship between boredom and time. After these observations, Heidegger will introduce two structural moments of boredom that will serve as a conductive thread for the analysis of this first form, namely, being held [die Hingehaltenheit] in limbo by time as it drags, and being left empty [Leergelassenheit] by the refusal of things.22 Following Heidegger, this first structural moment will consist of the oppression that happens while the default course of time holds us because of this intermediate time that is delayed between our arrival and the departure of the train. In this sense, the particular oppression of time is what held us. Explicitly, the particular oppression of time in its paralyzing elapsing holds us back. After all, we do not always get bored, but we get bored in front of this determined

21

22

The German word for the pastime is Zeitvertreib. The decomposition of the German word in Zeit and vertreiben reveals more strongly the curious relationship between time and the way of passing it. Zeit is the noun to designate what in English is time, and vertreiben is the verb that, in English, we translate as banish, expel, or divert. Thus, Zeitvertreiben lies to banish or expel time. In the English language, we can also recognize in pastime the relationship between time and the ways of passing it-​inhabiting it. Not only for the analysis of this first form but also for the other two forms of boredom (Heidegger, 1995 [§ 22]).

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situation by this train station. However, how can such retention pressure us? It does not happen that when the flow of time is delayed, we should have more freedom and field of action. Nevertheless, here, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, just the opposite happens: oppression happens as the morose passage of time retains us. Why is this oppression of such a peculiar character? This question leads us to the second structural moment: being left empty by the refusal of things. In turn, this second structural moment referred to this form of boredom will consist of the modification of the treatment we usually establish with the things surrounding us. Because these things refuse us, in this sense, being left empty means not to offer anything of the present things. Therefore, the train station denies us what we expected of it, and, in conjunction with its refusal, we are closed on itself as a whole of this particular situation. Heidegger writes (1995, p. 101): In the activity we have sought in passing the time we are not interested in what occupies us, nor even whether anything comes of it and we thereby help others. We are interested neither in the object nor in the result of the activity, but in being occupied as such and in this alone. We are seeking to be occupied in any way. Why? Merely so as not to fall into this being left empty that is emerging in boredom. That is why Heidegger calls this second moment being left empty by the refusal of things because, in this particular situation becoming bored by something, we are only interested—​through this time—​in filling this emptiness because of the refusal of the things. The exciting thing about this second moment is that the refusal of every entity, of the something at hand that surrounds us, opens an emptiness before us: the emptiness of being free before the world because it refuses us. This refusal of the entity and its correlative emptiness in us does not imply the physical disappearance of things and the world. In that being with us, its significance is modified due to this particular situation or attunement, and, with it, its denial is possible precisely because of its presence—​one that denies us its sense(s), so that what is denied to us is the horizon of remitting meanings implied by the world. With them—​the things that constitute it, from which the pastime surges—​we deal to fill the emptiness, to occupy ourselves, to distract ourselves to drive away from this boredom. That is why Heidegger writes about that being left empty of being in the following terms: they abandoned us to ourselves. It is because they have nothing to offer that they leave us empty. To leave empty means to be something at hand

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that offers nothing. Being left empty means to be offered nothing by what is at hand (1995, p. 103). Therefore, this second structural moment allows us to understand, at the same time, the first structural moment previously mentioned, being held in limbo by time as it drags. In this second moment, the course of time afflicts us since the things surrounding us and the horizon of meaning are denied. It afflicts us because we face the emptiness of meaning due to the denial of the entity that surrounds us in that particular situation.23 From these two structural moments, Heidegger further distinguishes that being bored by something responds to a particular situation. We know that we get bored in this particular situation, delimited by these external circumstances and not others. At the same time, this characteristic allows us to identify that the pastime comes from ourselves, it is us, each one in its particular existence, who evade the morose course of time through the pastime. That allows recognizing, likewise, that this ‘bored by’ comes from an external situation that exceeds our finitude (Heidegger, 1995). 5

Boredom and Its Correlative Temporariness, with Its Open Comprehension of the World and a Possible (re) Creative Attunement

After this characterization of boredom in this first form, we would like to rehearse a brief interpretation and a possible dialogue between this attunement of becoming bored by something and the creative attunement, in its broadest and most extensive possibility. We ask, then, how can this boredom be related to something with the creative attunement. We propose that the understanding and assumption of this boredom can open a direct possibility with the creative experience in its most original sense from the (re) understanding of our relationship with the world.24 As we have explained, and according to Heidegger’s analysis, this boredom hides a special relationship with our temporality; it is, in some way, a resistance to our existence during a temporary heaviness. We fight against it because, as we have seen in the previous section, the entity that surrounds us in that 23 24

“The fact that the station leaves us empty, its refusal, is somehow connected with the fact that time drags. Ultimately the dragging, oppressive time that holds us in limbo is what permits the station not to offer what it ought to” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 104). As root, the ground of all exercise and creative experience.

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particular situation denies us its senses, and the world with it, allowing our free existence. It is precisely in the assumption of this substantial freedom that the possibility of disassembling our daily understanding of the world from the denial of the entities emerges, allowing us to recognize the dynamic construction of the entities’ sense according to their circumstances.25 In other words, the world responds to our always dynamic (temporal) relation of meaning. When this boredom confronts the world emptiness, or the absence of sense, through the denial of being, there arises the possibility of recognizing the hidden but horrifying experience of knowing ourselves without a determined purpose.26 We confront emptiness, the void of our understanding, and relational freedom before things and the world,27 and the historical and temporal construction of our world and existence in it. We recognize in the assumption of this boredom a possible relationship with (re) creation of the world—​with the possibility of stressing, denying, and resignifying meaning to the objects and entities that surround us, and, from/​ through them, to the world itself. Maybe, in this boredom, it may arise that the pastime becomes a possibility of creation, and, in this way, transform the pastime as something (pro) positive—​that the denial of being and its way of leaving us empty allows us to recreate its meaning. Perhaps, it hides in this possibility of understanding the entity, in this particular situation, a (re) understanding of the world from the creation of its meaning. Boredom transforms, as well as the hobby, in its exclusionary pole: a filled being, a recreation of the world. 6

Conclusion

To conclude, we would like to emphasize that this chapter rehearses a possible relationship between the assumption or acceptance of boredom in this first form with the creative attunement in its most generic and broad sense. We say 25

26

27

Heidegger will say that everything has its time: “[b]‌ecoming bored is thus the fact that particular things, in what they offer us or do not offer us and in the way that they do, are in each case co-​determined by a particular time, in each case have their particular time” (1995, p. 105). Recall that, according to the philosopher Humberto Maturana, the etymology of the Spanish word for boredom, aburrimiento, is composed of the particle ‘ab,’ referring to ‘emptiness’ or ‘absence,’ so ab-​horrere would mean ‘fear or terror of emptiness,’ and extension, fear of absence. Absence of what? Of the world? Of meaning? I understand relational as the way how we always relate to every entity in the world. Our existence is relational, and, in this way, each relationship conditions our understanding of the phenomena of the world.

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a ‘possible relationship’ since we do not think it is a necessary relationship but latent, nor the only possibility of cultivating or awakening a creative attunement. Instead, this chapter aims to open a space for dialogue and to suggest a new possible relationship between the hidden but stalking boredom that our postmodern society does not allow us to cultivate, and rejects through different entertainments28 and creation, in the most original and regular sense. In this sense, we find Octavio Paz’s analysis of the poetic creation, in his book El arco y la lira [The Bow and the Lyre], very suggestive for it adjoins with my interpretation of the potential relationship between boredom and creation. Paz writes (2009, p. 159): Here is the poet before the paper. It does not matter whether he has a plan, if he has meditated for a long time about what he is going to write, or if his consciousness is as empty and blank as the immaculate paper that alternately attracts and repels him. The act of writing involves, as the first movement, a separating oneself from the world, something like throwing oneself into the void. Now the poet is alone. All that was his everyday world and his usual preoccupations a moment ago. If the poet truly wishes to write and not to perform a vague literary ceremony, his act leads him to break away from the world and to indirect everything—​not excluding himself. Then, there are two possibilities: everything can turn into vapor and disintegrate, lose weight, float, and finally dissolve, or everything can close and turn aggressively into an object without meaning, a matter that is immeasurable and impenetrable to the light of significance. The world opens: it is an abyss, a giant yawn; the world—​the table, the wall, the globe, the remembered faces—​closes and becomes a wall without fissures. In both cases, the poet is left alone, without a world to lean on. It is time to create the world anew and to name again with words that menacing external vacuity: table, tree, lips, stars, nothing.

Bibliography

Espinoza Cáceres, J.A. (2010). ¿Qué son los temples de ánimo? A propósito del análisis interpretativo heideggeriano del aburrimiento [What are Moods? About the Heideggerian Interpretative Analysis of Boredom], Degree Dissertation, Department of Philosophy, University of Chile. 28

It would be necessary to specify the difference between hobby and pastime, and its relationship with creation and recreation.

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Haugeland, J. (2013). Dasein Disclosed:  John Haugeland’s Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. (1988). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington/​Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2000). Towards the Definition of Philosophy. London: Athlone Press. Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press. Husserl, E. (2001). Logical Investigations, Volume 2. London/​New York: Routledge. Lipovetsky, G. (1989). L’Ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain [The Age of Emptiness: Essays on Contemporary Individualism Lipovetsky]. Paris: Gallimard. Paz, O. (2008) The Bow and the Lyre. Austin/​London: University of Texas Press.

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Perfect Boredom: From Disillusion to Creativity Sergio Velasco Caballero Abstract Understanding boredom and incorporating it into our lives is beneficial for emotional well-​being. Its process goes beyond the scope of affection, providing insight into volitional issues such as the aesthetics of subjectivity. Boredom uncovers the reality as an illusory order, which pushes consciousness to its limits. For this reason, we adopt a transpersonal approach to examine the aesthetic consequences of this emotion through art. We also review a set of anonymous exhibits on the Internet that stem from supposed creative boredom, employing the method of Instantaneous Creativity®. This resource combines art, psychology, and spirituality to contribute to the creative development of human beings. Thus, we examine the fact that—​from sensitivity to other derived affects—​every factor of boredom is a personal projection that serves as a way to transcend it.

Keywords boredom –​creativity –​emotional well-​being –​instantaneous creativity –​spirituality

1

Introduction

Creativity is a faculty highly valued by human beings. Today, more than ever, as reinvention has established itself as a technological, social, and cultural value, new solutions are always in demand for work or daily life, solutions that might either be new forms of behavior and thought or the conscious self-​inquiry of emotions. Therefore, creativity is pivotal for efficient performance and self-​ realization. The formulation of ideas and combinations that creativity enables indicates the existence of a mysterious creative power that soothes us, that is to say, allows us to flow with the world and makes us feel good. In addition to the dedication and abilities it requires, creativity enriches our acquired skills and outcomes. In other words, this ability connects the depth of our being to the surrounding world.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_013

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It is not for nothing that transpersonal psychology associates it with peak experiences since our current limits boost our creativity. The creative adventure moves onto the unsuspected but, on the way, we recognize patterns that reduce the opportunities of experience, because they represent a starting point for new ways of doing things. Creativity does not emerge because of a programmed life, but thanks to it—​integrating it and spreading its boundaries. Just as light and darkness coexist, our consciousness requires limits to be creative. We propose that boredom expands our creativity to counteract not only the stigma this emotion is associated with but also the perception that boredom restrains creativity. There seems to be something insurmountable discrepancy between the two—​a distance we often use as an excuse to get distracted and to succumb to our limitations. In this way, any activity involving responsibility bores us, and we prefer disregarding it instead of taking up the opportunity, so we do not have to change ourselves. As though everything was predetermined, the ability to rely on and being surprised by life fades, and we resign bitterly to our narrow-​mindedness’ inertia. We are thus locked in our illusion. 2

Continuity of Boredom

Projection is a psychological procedure by which we perceive, in the external world, what we have not consciously integrated into ourselves. Due to this, we usually interpret reality through the lens of our mental world, which makes our perception subjective and mostly illusory, regardless of whether it is individualistic or collectively shared. Thus, the projection broadly bases boredom on when we expect reality to adapt to our values or interests, a gap between will and reality. Arthur Schopenhauer talks about a will that subdues us to illusory and virtually worthless versions of reality, losing our way in a pursuit that inevitably ends up boring us: The basis of all willing is need, lack, and thus pain, which is its primordial destiny by virtue of its essence. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects to will, its former objects having been quickly dispelled as too easily achieved, it is seized with a terrible emptiness and boredom: i.e. its essence and its being itself become an intolerable burden to it (2010, p. 338). For instance, we may wish time went by faster when attending a meeting. In this case, we internally project the moment we would like it to end by because, otherwise, we would lose interest in the meeting entirely. This way, we look

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forward to an end that never comes. We hang onto the lack of correspondence between subjective and objective time—​an interval that Martin Heidegger understood as a temporal discrepancy ideal for boring us. Heidegger states that since “boredom is only possible at all because each thing, as we say, has its time” (1995, p.  105). The hope of fulfilling the objective of our projection commonly leads to the experience of the emptiness of will, as Schopenhauer claims. Chasing after the fictitious object of our projections may result in characteristic temporal distention and the experience of boredom. That leads us, according to Heidegger, to the tragic end that befalls our existence, where we perceive time as a necessary condition. This fact implies the incapability of granting our transient wishes since they fade away, much like illusions. The world then loses its meaning and reveals its most bottomless emptiness to us. It is the profound boredom where it is boring for one, Beings have—​as we say—​become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves as these people are not expected. We no longer stand as subjects and suchlike opposite these beings and excluded from them, but find ourselves in the midst of beings as a whole, i.e., in the whole of this indifference. Beings as a whole do not disappear, however, but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference. The emptiness accordingly here consists in [sic] the indifference enveloping beings as a whole (Heidegger, 1995, p. 138). All interest in life is lost. Hence, we encounter the tragedy of self-​awareness and our finiteness in the temporary nature of existence. That is the reason why boredom is an inherent consequence of the consciousness of time, and, at the same time, it is the attunement that consciousness gazes at with total indifference. Hopefully, as Heidegger says, it is possible to avoid this suffering if we listen to the call that stems from our being. Refuting this argument 60 years later, Jean Luc Marion points out that the great indifference has no reason to answer this call since, as quoted by Heidegger himself, it failed to observe even “the wonder of all wonders: that there are things-​in-​being” (1951, p. 42, a. trans.). The extent of boredom is far-​reaching, Boredom defuses the explosion of any call, whatever it might be; it covers itself, refuses to expose itself, defuses the conflict by deserting the field. Absent to beings, to the other, even to Being, it is not there for anyone, to the point that in a sense the one who yields to boredom no longer is (Marion, 1998, p. 191).

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The indifference caused by boredom overlooks beings as well as the Being. It challenges us to chase it in a race whose finishing line, according to Marion, is the encounter with the call—​a pure form that the philosopher has not specified. Nevertheless, at any rate, he confirms that boredom predisposes a complete dedication to Dasein (human existence), to the call, when it triggers our ontic and ontological interests this time, boredom could work in the name of and in favor of authenticity; for in separating Dasein from the Being that it has to be, boredom tends only to free it so that it might devote itself to a more essential property (Marion, 1998, p. 196). At this stage of the process, there are no edges for human existence. Boredom leads us from the complex to the unknown—​beyond this world, the subject, and the Being. And then it is gone. Boredom disappeared, and there is nothing left of it. However, what will become of its loss of will? Michael Washburn regards boredom as a characteristic symptom of an existential syndrome of maturity: that is, a period of inquiry and insecurity concerning the subject when the dual foundation between the subject and the object developed by the ego for survival staggers. One’s personality begins to lack this sense. That is the reason why Washburn considers boredom as an altered state of consciousness that is typical of Borderline Personality Disorder (bpd). Being sustained by an essentially egoistic and detached personality and mind, the subject loses willpower and feels disheartened or indifferent to the ups and downs of life: bored, because they feel empty and aimless as if they were on the verge of death. In other words, boredom can be defined as the disillusion of an ego that has witnessed—​and is terrified of—​its extinction. The borderline’s emptiness is a state of oppressive destitution, of heaviness and sunkenness, of grim inner vacancy or absorption. Jerome Kroll notes that borderlines are subject to morbid semitrance states associated with feelings of emptiness. Such trances are altered states of consciousness that, in the view being presented here, indicate that borderlines are subject to the captivating influence of darkly working inner gravitational forces. The emptiness experienced by borderlines, therefore, is indeed a state of boredom, but not in any of the usual senses of the term. For this boredom is not a sense of having nothing to do, or a sense of lacking the desire to become involved, or even a sense of being unable to become involved, but rather a sense of having to endure a relentless inner gravity auguring engulfment and extinction (Washburn, 1994, p. 214).

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Therefore, Washburn’s transpersonal framework enables us to reinterpret the pathological status of the emotion within transpersonal self-​realization. It must include the genuine disillusionment caused by boredom (the subject denial and the discovery of emptiness), [a]‌s the world loses its positive and negative values, the mental ego loses its hopes and fears, its desires and aversions. The world ceases motivating the mental ego, and the mental ego, consequently, ceases responding to the world. The mental ego becomes bored (1994, p. 197). Not only does this disillusionment cause pain, but it is also an indetermination, acknowledged here as a vast availability. According to Washburn, this favors the change of meanings (transvaluation) that should put an end to the crisis of boredom. Boredom is no longer a terrible precedent of death—​instead, it is a transitory life period. Therefore, we should understand the concept of disillusion hereafter in a dual sense: negative, as a disenchantment or deception, but also positive, as liberation and disappointment of a false reality. Vicente Huidobro delves deep into this psychological landscape between fantasy and disillusion by undertaking a poetic journey throughout the Ennui couleur chair [Flesh-​colored boredom]. It is a journey to the boundaries of existence between a futile physical dimension and an antagonizing ontological one (Huidobro, 1929, pp. 164–​165): Oh faraway how much empty space on your side Awkward space incessantly stretched  Fortified by tempests surrounded by optical ditches and planetary systems Things that we now know Or will know soon far away Look at the ship of the eclipse more and more The world is young, and the pain is old My despair clangs in my bones And the violin of my nerves sounds an undetectable note Fabulous as the shot of a revolver next to my ear Start of a flower and a trip on a milky way. The vision frightens the poet so much that he wishes to return to the graceful restlessness of his boredom, at the beginning of the poem, to avoid more profound boredom: ‘Let’s get back from boredom to boredom’ (Huidobro, 1929). However, his limited will succeeds in describing the episode of the denial.

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Paralyzed by the disturbing images emerging from the emptiness of existence, Huidobro finds he can endure more, reach the limits of his individuality, and leave his will behind. What we perceive as eagerness for knowledge motivates him to sense the ample landscape of the Heideggerian indifference (the essence of the horizon). Nevertheless, plagued by the fear of desperation—​or the fear that the minor sign of the poet’s will to be, which sustains the poet’s identity may die out—​he decides to give up and back down. An early example of the disillusionment that is characteristic of boredom is the interpretation of Saint John of the Cross regarding acedia—​a collective state of the initiate who becomes bored with the spiritual life. However, within the passive night of the senses, which involves the denial of desires, acedia becomes a process where “the soul is purged hereof likewise in this aridity of the desire and acquires the virtues opposed to them” (Saint John of the Cross, 2012, p. 36), paving the way for the encounter with God. Neither are the sloth and the irksomeness, which it now experiences concerning spiritual things vicious as they were before. For in the past these sins proceeded from the spiritual pleasures which the soul sometimes experienced and sought after when it found them not. But this new weariness proceeds not from this insufficiency of pleasure because God has taken from the soul pleasure in all things in this purgation of the desire (Saint John of the Cross, 2012, pp. 36–​37). God, Himself, enables the exploitation of acedia on the way to the achievement of perfection, nullifying the monk’s will until they reach a level of indifference. It marks the first time in the history of boredom that somebody clearly defines boredom as a resource for surrender and disregard. Therefore, acedia is also an episode of disillusionment that foreshadows the Creator’s impersonal contemplation. Centuries later, Siegfried Kracauer aspires to achieve this goal when, in 1924, he contrasted naturally-​assimilated boredom in daily life, which is open to contemplation, with negative boredom that the forms of mass media—​such as the radio or advertising projects—​use to supersaturate our senses and turn people into distant images of themselves. If, however, one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly. A landscape appears in which colorful peacocks strut about and images of people suffused with soul come into view. And look—​your own soul is likewise swelling, and in ecstasy you name what you have

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always lacked:  the great passion. Were this passion—​which shimmers like a comet—​to descend, were it to envelop you, the others, and the world—​oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be (Kracauer, 1995, p. 334). The conscious practice of boredom makes us aware of the untold, converting the great indifference to the enthusiastic transformation of an experience that can only make us healthier and more real—​an unprecedented achievement for those immersed in themselves or those who live locked or imprisoned in a specific space or context. Isolation, either mental or physical, brought about by a programmed life is one of the major handicaps in overcoming boredom. However, even in extreme inevitable conditions, such as in the case of a diseased individual, Piero Ferrucci says that becoming bored is no reason to restrict one’s access to the transpersonal ‘superior self,’ [m]‌oreover, the period of confinement—​so often characterized by loneliness, boredom, confusion, or despair—​can be used creatively. When everyday life is interrupted by illness, when the normal roles cannot be played and one’s sensitivity becomes more acute, new perspectives open up before the patients, which they can be helped to recognize and use. […] the vision of the Self can transform the very way in which medicine is understood today (1990, p. 346). A minor case along these lines, although thoroughly genuine, was Oceanografía del tedio [Oceanography of Boredom], written by Eugenio D’Ors, where his doctor prescribes him to plunge himself into a rural-​tedium therapy to rid himself of urban stress. It implied a period of sensorial recovery wherein he would achieve cenesthesia, nullifying the will until it was ‘absent of movement and thought.’ Therefore, the patient perceives insignificant details that his sensitivity would not have perceived otherwise. One such fact was that the observer and the observed synchronically move as if they shared an expandable will—​unperceived for being impersonal but regarded as the silent creator of experience, nevertheless. This way, D’Ors falls into his disillusionment: an ambiguous indefinite revelation that follows the liberation of his remaining ambition, which is the will to experience boredom. Only then does he feel fulfilled, However, out of the core of this loss, while fleeing, a rare feeling of happiness seems to grow. He feels happiness even before knowing why. It feels

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like liberation, like being born. Running through the park, he goes, and the rare happiness bestows wings on him (D’Ors, 1921, p. 121, a. trans.). Boredom diminishes the will, but we are the ones who decide whether to abandon or resist it entirely. We can rely on our emotional processes and insist on suppressing it in such a way that resistance to boredom becomes notorious in reality and hides its illusory nature. On the contrary, if we live with its fragility, this makes us become one with it to be, as Eugenio D’Ors said, “master, lord and artist of the real emotions, an organist of our magic organ” (1921, p. 61, a. trans.). That can lead us to the aesthetic understanding of boredom. When the fluid dialogue between thought and sensitivity comes to a standstill, the will that regularly traveled from pleasure to aversion begins to deteriorate in the neutrality of great value-​free indifference. We perceive the world as an uncertain set of aimless illusions. As thought and sensitivity become anesthetized, we can no longer experience genuine aesthetic pleasure. For a change, our lack of credibility in a natural encounter with the world lets us down. Owing to this, when we experience boredom, this disillusionment with the world leads to the aesthetic disillusionment of the subject—​the essential questioning of our cognitive and sensorial interpretations that we can understand as an aesthetic denial or negative aesthetics. The concept of ‘degenerative aesthetics,’ put forth by Elías Capriles, is used to apply this aesthetic disillusionment to a transpersonal vision. The author states that, much like the human psyche, aesthetics degenerate when culture follows the pattern of the ‘delusion’ of duality: the confusion that subdues art to a false idea of aesthetic progress, which only aims at creating different representations of the same misleading reality. Art becomes trapped in desire and inevitably in boredom as well. Thus, we think our object of study is an ultimate experience of degenerative aesthetics that broadly ascribed to the questioning of the traditional values of art. Moreover, the disillusionment of the artistic subject’s will, the consequent aesthetic indifference, and the very denial of reality in favor of a new possibility are typical characteristics of degenerative aesthetics. It reveals the artistic purpose of boredom, which is not only an artist’s resource to portray the ‘mimic’ of the ‘demoniac’—​as Kierkegaard would say (1980)—​but also a chance to embody it and comprehend what it is to be a representation. We can say we long for the awakening from the illusory dimension of our existence when we experience boredom. That supposes that we experience it as a phenomenon of aesthetic disillusionment, where the divisions between work-​author, artist-​public, or art-​life lose their essence. In other words, the simple presence of boredom in a piece of art exhibits the

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illusory nature of the subject and art itself, turning art into an available space to discover such emptiness. Elías Capriles usefully describes this abandonment of duality by mentioning an inflection period defined by the ‘absurd,’ which is representative of boredom as well, once the development of the degeneration process, which is set in motion by the breaking of the psyche of human beings and that, in society, drags fragmentation into its logical extreme, and the effects of which comes down to the absurd; both breaking and fragmentation must be surpassed with the result there would be a regeneration that, on the aesthetic plane, would mean a reestablishment of real art and would make true beauty gleam in every human product (2000, p. 70, a. trans.). On these lines, he mentions a pivotal ‘visionary’ effect to surpass the absurd, “the denial of judgment in the underlying illusion of separability” (Capriles, 2000, p. 7, a. trans.). If boredom was deemed as a loss of sense, we would realize that the disillusioned person is not concerned with the judgment of a world that seems to be false. In that case, why are we devoting our effort to something unreal? We must speculate. This way, when subjectivity tends to disappear, the root of judgment, which is inherent in the process of boredom, disappears as well. It is then our will to judge that takes us back to the experience of degeneration and negative boredom. For this reason, if we wish to skirt around the limitations stemming from judgment, we must assign meaning to the absurd. To mean implies neither whiling away time with evasive actions nor waiting in the perpetual emptiness of boredom. It becomes imperative to come up with a dynamic meaning whose adaptability allows us creatively to adjust to reality. We practice the surrender pathway consisting of the radical and sincere abandon of our will (or what is left of it) during the experience of boredom, including judgment.1 In a practical sense, we comply with the natural inertia of the emotion to refrain ourselves from resistance—​becoming one with the flow of life itself. As Jean Luc Marion says, it is about “render[ing] oneself to

1 Although more arduous, another accepted procedure for the integration of boredom consists of the awareness of the unconscious judgments that motivate it. The chapter “Implicaciones psíquicas del aburrimiento desde el trauma de la desvalorización a los juicios de valor” [“Boredom Psychic Implications from the Trauma of Devaluation to Value Judgments”] explains it in depth. Also, according to Rafael Echeverría, boredom is a projected judgment as “no boring facts or events themselves exist, but so does observers who become bored in specific facts or events” (2007, p. 187, a. trans.).

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the call in the double sense of abandoning oneself to it and of moving toward it” (1998, p. 198). That implies overcoming our previous beliefs. The act of surrendering sets us off to transcendental knowledge, turning our limitations into opportunities to grow beyond our condition as a subject. We follow this interpretation as a gate to a transpersonal experience. As Richard D. Hawkins (2013) thoroughly clarifies, the purpose of the mechanism of surrender is to transcend the illusions of the world and reach the ultimate truth behind it—​which is Self-​ Realization—​and to discover the very basis of the mind itself, the source of all thought and feeling. Seen through the lens of boredom, even momentarily, this discovery might seem paradoxical or even absurd when the experience plays the role of the emptiness mentioned above and indifference. It turns the surrender to boredom into upsetting disillusionment. The artistic avant-​garde in the 20th century made this surrender easier because it took advantage of its unique features. For the first time, art suffered the consequences of the passage of time, becoming more and more boring—​ pieces of art served as a pretext to take us unnoticed to the spectacle of our vanishing (ego). Nonetheless, other pieces offered new access to reality by disrupting individual behavior, and the creative and artistic consequences of these achievements are pending of examination.2 In any case, boredom became part of a new category of aesthetics based on indifference and the lack of aesthetic sense. Moreover, boredom is an indefinite area of countless possibilities, conditioned by the artist with the use of the absurd and the temporal dimensions. As Ramón Gómez de la Serna states, “If we could take advantage of boredom, we would get a waterfall with more millions horsepower than any other” (1962, p. 193, a. trans.), a revolutionary strategy Julian Jason Haladyn groundbreakingly explains as the ultimate impulse of a will to boredom:

2 For further information about the artistic use of boredom in 20th century, please consult the fourth chapter of my Ph.D., “Vinculaciones del aburrimiento con el arte desde las vanguardias a la contemporaneidad” [“Relationship between Boredom and Art from Vanguard to Contemporaneity”] (Velasco Caballero, 2017, pp. 261–​378) as well as the paper “Saltos apáticos. La integración protoperformativa del aburrimiento en la vanguardia histórica española” [“Apathetic Leaps: The Protoperformative Integration of Boredom in the Spanish Historical Avant-​garde”] (Velasco Caballero, 2018).

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This is the will to boredom: the passionate yes that endures standing before the meaninglessness of a merely subjective world in the hopes of seeing more, of experiencing through this lack the possibility of creating meaning where none exists. For this reason, the principal mode of expressing and developing the will to boredom in modernity is in the creative capacities of art, with the critique of culture undertaken by the avant-​garde and its inheritors representing an active use of boredom, as a means of challenging the will of the spectator specifically and the institution of art generally (2015, p. 124). Ernst Gombrich recognizes that the artist’s unoccupied will can also offer high-​quality works of art, a view that the history of art agreed with when it changed the paradigm that replaced the technical evaluation criteria with a creative one. By doing so, it widened the range of possibilities of a work of art to be deemed as such, as it would have been unknown otherwise, “[t]‌hus, we owe the pleasure of looking at these fruits of their boredom to that radical change that came to identify artistic activity not so much with skill as with the urge to create” (Gombrich, 1999, p. 212). It is a type of boredom that, regardless of its intrinsic value as a permanent experience, is strongly associated with the criteria of the historians working for the events’ development. It continues to elaborate on its validity and cultural relevance. This is a blissful experience—​ as Gombrich himself asserts—​because it can be an essential resource for creation by benefiting an unconcerned, automatic, and predominantly involuntary fulfillment that widens the range of representation and the techniques applied to any expectation. The artists Johannes Deimling and Angelika Fojtuch point out the importance of surrendering to boredom to transcend our limitations: [boredom] is the creativity time par excellence:  to experience the real boundaries and genuinely feel them, it is essential to face and fight hand in hand against boredom. The reward for patience is patience. Boredom is not a way of indifference, but a resort to thrive. After boredom, comes impatience; then, the idea; and finally, the activity (2007, p. 219, a. trans.). To conclude, the disillusionment of boredom makes apparent the basis of will and recognizing it dilutes our resistance to creativity. Our only chance is to wait patiently for the will to placate itself (surrender). Will may reverse itself to boost this emotional contemplation where disillusionment is also an experience of full sensitivity. For this reason, there will be continuity, not distance, between boredom and creativity.

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Instantaneous Creativity® Method and the Cases of Boredom

According to Abraham Maslow, creativity is ‘systematic’ in the individual and we can explain it with the primary process of intuition and the secondary process of realization. The phenomenon has been divided because, according to the Maslow, [t]‌he latter phase stresses not only on creativeness, but also relies very much on just plain hard work, on the discipline of the artist who may spend half a lifetime learning his tools, his skills, and his materials, until he becomes finally ready for a full expression of what he sees (1993, p. 57). These two stages can be found in scientific and artistic ideas as well, such as those of David Bohm (implicate and explicate order) or Robert Filliou (absolute and relative permanent creation).3 Both must necessarily be creative. However, despite the demarcation, under no circumstances can we detract our attention to the secondary process. Logically, as Carl Gustav Jung states, although a primary impulse of inspiration prompts every individual, “we can only understand him in his capacity of artist by looking at his creative achievement” (2005, p. 172). Therefore, the secondary stage is not more confused or impure than the primary stage due to factors Maslow regards as extra-​creative: work, discipline, tools, skills, and materials. On the contrary, these factors are also the visible ‘achievements’ of transpersonal creativity—​even though this may be difficult to see due to essentialist prejudices. The concept of the ‘participatory turn’ that Jorge N.  Ferrer puts forth for transpersonal psychology goes beyond psychological concepts like essentialist prejudice. He places creativity at the heart of life, providing an ample vision that integrates different cultural and spiritual expressions into transpersonal knowledge. He questions several beliefs: those of experimentalism that narrow down the transpersonal phenomena exclusively to the individual; those of internal empiricism that call for a scientific explanation; and those of perennialism that are chosen by following a criterion of universality. These beliefs confine themselves to an intra-​subjective and egocentric perception of these phenomena. Ferrer includes them in his idea of participatory transpersonal knowledge as a “creative and multidimensional human access to reality” (2001, p. 228). Thus, we treat complex events whose intellectual, emotional, corporal, 3 To delve into the dialogue about boredom, art, and science, please see section 3.1 in my Ph.D. “El poder creativo de la conciencia” [“The Creative Power of Awareness”] (Velasco Caballero, 2017, pp. 200–​228).

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and intuitive (and so on) dimensions appear in individuals, groups, or relationships. This way, transpersonal knowledge becomes evident in the holistic interaction of the parts, or, more precisely, in their enactment, “the bringing forth of a world or domain of distinctions co-​created by the different elements involved in the participatory event” (Ferrer, 2001, p. 123). In short, to enact is to find oneself as an active participant of a creatively organized whole, The basic idea underlying the participatory turn, then, is not that an expansion of individual consciousness allows access to transpersonal contents, but rather that the emergence of a transpersonal event precipitates in the individual what has been called a transpersonal experience. Thus understood, the ontological dimension of transpersonal phenomena is primary and results in the experiential one (Ferrer, 2001, p. 116). We obtain a primary and secondary stage anew, except that in this case, the transpersonal experience is brought into the secondary order. Concerning this, we realize that allowing for the experience of boredom and the centrality of creativity this model provides, a straightforward dialogue between boredom and creativity can be considered. The participatory turn precisely explains the continuity of the process of boredom. Furthermore, we can notice this in its involvement, because, in general terms, it consists of thriving from ignorance to the knowledge of wholeness—​knowledge based on the abandonment or surrender of the will to the natural process of boredom. On the other hand, enactment unceasingly waters down the limits of the subject, and negatively so, before being able to have continuous access to creativity. Keeping all this in mind, we understand that enactment transforms the original, emotional, physiological, and behavioral state of bored individuals. Together with related statements and artistic samples, this can potentially become our object of study in a broadly unnoticed transpersonal event so far. To some extent, this explains that the drifts from boredom, contrary to all expectations, may surprise us. According to some scientific studies, these drifts can include murder, addiction to gambling, or even compulsive consumerism. On the other hand, they have been proved to encourage communication with others and even make us more creative (Mann, 2017). In any case, these consequences seem contradictory to the commonly perceived image of a bored person who produces a large variety of scattered manners, which we have not comprehended yet. Following the introduction to the concept of creativity, we highlight some products of boredom from the general perspective of Instantaneous Creativity,

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an experimental method inspired in artistic practice that, although in its initial stages, allows us to appreciate how consciousness creates and attracts the shapes it perceives.4 Its goal lies in reversing the creative process, keeping in mind that the stages and virtues of its manifestation (secondary creativity) simultaneously respond to subject inspiration (primary creativity). Beyond art, this fact implies any activity, including that of becoming bored. Accordingly, the method influences the technical factors involved in this sensitivity: knowledge, gestures, tools, and materials that enact the consciousness of the individual. For instance, Gabriel García Márquez stated that when one becomes bored with writing, the reader becomes bored with reading, which leads us into this direction (Grijelmo, 1998). In addition to this, the perception of style, content, or design requires specific conditions that the writer and reader experience and can even share in their literary boredom. Following this, we can understand such correspondences and integrate conflicting factors at the same time. We deal with examples of the integration of boredom not only to verify them but also to depict a practical dimension that, though it might seem unlikely, can be comprehended thanks to Instantaneous Creativity. We insist that developing this method is beyond the scope of this essay. Therefore, we will only introduce the topic.5 How can someone’s boredom and actions be correlated beyond the mood that inspires them? According to the proposal of Instantaneous Creativity, any aspect that is not integrated into consciousness will reflex itself in the form of a projection. That is the reason behind the technical access to the reality that fuses the mental realm with the physical one. Thus, by basing our ideas on the first boredom artists we explained, we treat boredom as an available material for the consciousness. Its consequences would then depend on how we utilize it and not on boredom itself. We focus on a daily phenomenon published online as ‘creative boredom.’ It involves anonymously keeping track of and sharing the exploits emerging out 4 The function of the Instantaneous Creativity is to make more accessible the creative well-​being in any realm of life. Therefore, it obeys neither the professional field nor the established subject; it does not possess academic or professional ratification per se. It is because of this that it acquires a complementary nature, making it easy to adapt to any susceptible activity to be creatively experienced. It is useful to overcome creative conflicts, but these conflicts might facilitate the stimulation of ideas, the creative stability in real-​time during the work process, the solution of conceptual or formal conflicts, and the evaluation of results, in addition to the promotion of the capability of technical development. We must bear in mind that, regardless of being centered on the recovery of creativity, this proposal does not belong to the therapeutic scope. Its application exclusively consists of personalized accompaniment. 5 For further information, please consult www.creatividadinstantanea.com.

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of boredom via the means of memes, images, videos, blogs, and social media. It is possible to encounter a situation where, after finding an image referring to this possibility, people consider creative boredom without the reliability of those who document the experience and its results. Likewise, both cases indicate there is a manifest belief concerning the creative integration of boredom. This belief materializes through the enactment of objects, behaviors, and situations that we previously considered as boring. This activity is not about judging whether the results are creative or not, let alone the level of creativity since the consciousness creatively enacts as we engage in transpersonal participation. It will be more suitable to consider the fact that, for the main participants, the events are creative owing to the feeling or outcomes they obtain from them. At any rate, we deal with favorable boring situations for invention. We establish three predominant tendencies—​some are abstract or figurative representations without distinction (draws, sketches, scribbles, paints); some individuals change the purpose of an object or a pre-​given image by superimposing a representation such as those mentioned previously (generally a trompe l’oeil); in other cases, the purpose and use of the object is changed completely, transforming its usual value and influencing the perception of the context. The third case is the most radical tendency associated with boredom for two reasons. First, there is an imbalance between low difficulty and high skill, using which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (2013) explained as emotion, as opposed to the balance during the creativity stage or flow. That is the reason why participants experiencing creative boredom tend to neutralize their skills by increasing the challenge level. Second, this tendency leads us from the emptiness of boredom to the experience of the purest absurdity. This effect is produced when the functional logic of the object and its situation gets transformed more than expected. Some examples worth testing are listed below: Placing several pens upright and balancing them. Creating an arch out of computer monitors to dance the limbo. Collecting objects and shaping a specific silhouette using their shadows. Carving geometrical shapes on pencils. Shaping soft-​drink cans. Covering vast areas with post-​its. Stuffing frames with sheets of paper one after another. Piling up dice and balancing them on one of their vertexes. Tidying up things compulsively (according to their size, color, texture) Carving fruits. Building structures with pens. Braiding toilet paper.

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Building a tower out of class desks. Poking the pencil into the rubber and dropping it on a skate. Wrapping up one’s head with sliced bread. Composing music by banging pens against hard surfaces. Spinning around in a swivel chair. Creating human figures using stationery. Painting with correction fluid. Wrapping oneself up in cling film. Fitting oneself into a shelf. Regarding Instantaneous Creativity, we point out how boredom enacts in synchronization with technical factors. We must keep in mind the central role of consciousness that gathers all the components of experience creatively. In doing so, the consciousness, with its creative multidimensional access to the world, indefinitely enacts reality as the whole, producing previously unexpressed synchronic visions.6 In short, we outline an inspirational process that drifts off from boredom and ends up being exemplified as activities such as the ones mentioned above, primarily when subjects abandon their will to flow by doing things that would otherwise be considered severe, mandatory, or boring. Moreover, these are diverse expressions of the same state of boredom. The phenomenon addressed is associated with the idea of continuity put forth by artists, despite differing in that the former has already done so, and the latter suggests complementing it. It can be proven by the fact that most of these anonymous actions create new ways of involvement in contexts where boredom is usually a problem, such as one’s school or workplace. It does not imply compensation-​seeking to escape or bottle up a negative feeling with something predetermined (as it would be if one were to surf the Internet). Instead, this compensation enables participation in and creative engagement with any available element.

6 The method gathers artistic, psychological, and spiritual knowledge to put forth a holistic touch of creativity. Within art, it studies the relation between creativity and technical factors (knowledge, gesture, tools, and materials). Within psychology, the effects they have on our perception and behavior. Within spirituality, the role it plays after achieving the balance and inner peace necessary for happiness. Some of these models are theories of humanistic and transpersonal psychologies—​the theories of Carl Gustav Jung, Richard D. Hawkins, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enric Corbera, or Elaine and Arthur Aron, together with the thoughts and works of 20th-​century artists such as Huidobro, John Cage, and Robert Filliou, among others.

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3.1 Application of Instantaneous Creativity® Method In the initial stage of the project, we establish three phases. They display the inversion of the creative process, beginning with the observation of the subjective perception (creation), due to which we become aware of virtually enacting the reality (creator), and this allows us to engage with it (creativity). That said, we can understand boredom as a material whose awareness hints at the consciousness as a creator. Depending on the degree of this knowledge, it makes us counterbalance the previous emptiness through potentially creative action. 3.1.1 Creation Phase The most representative phase of this method consists of guiding the subjects to the experimentation of synchrony between projection and technical factors (knowledge, gestures, tools, and materials). Thus, we observe certain redundant features that were impacted by continuity. It does not mean that every realization with these features or similar ones is related to either boredom or disillusionment. It is present in abundance in forms of balance, accumulation, and subtraction:  forms whose physical stability depends on a slight footing, overlapped, or stacked forms and forms that are modified, torn or scraped. The first type refers to space, the second to the object itself, and the third to the material constituting them. Hereafter, a specific level requires the particular subject’s projections. With the help of these, we can establish the existing relations between what the subject thinks about their circumstances and its precise expression through the perception or choice of materials, action plans, manipulation, or even insignificant details or ‘mistakes’ often overlooked in every creative process. In general, all the forms in balance, accumulation, and subtraction correspond to a consciousness that, when experiencing boredom, seeks compensation (balance). It turns itself away from the emptiness of meaning (subtraction) to fullness (accumulation). This way, we transit from understanding boredom as a whole to understanding its shades and data that, on an in-​depth level, make every individual experience boredom in their novel way and, thereby, express themselves in one way or another. This phase ends with the direct experience of a change in perception, where the consciousness can contemplate that all its processes have hugely symbolic correspondence, which is in synchrony with reality to the point of achieving total identification with every feature of experience. In essence, the experience is not about articulating mentally or understanding it but about feeling it. 3.1.2 Creator Phase This is the most straightforward phase while simultaneously being is the hardest as it implies the complete abandonment of the knowledge acquired in the first

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phase, given that only the subject’s projections had to be acknowledged for their neutralization. The surrender is pivotal to enable this transpersonal event to embrace the consciousness—​a gate only the subject in question can cross using descriptive contemplation, especially without the judgment of technical factors and their impacts. In this case, it is useful to remember that boredom enables the surrender when it placates the will. Consequently, we can say the bored subjects have undergone an episode of disillusionment concerning reality that has detached them from prefigured visions against their will and led them to a state of potentially creative emptiness. In this way, surrendering to boredom implies the abandonment of any preconceived notion about boredom. There is an indication by which we can indirectly demonstrate the success of this phase in the ‘creative boredom’ and understand that the fact of sharing these cases is not just a motive for fun but also a gesture of interest and self-​esteem that carries this phenomenon consciously from subjective experience to social reality. 3.1.3 Creativity Phase This last phase represents the natural manifestation and spontaneity of the creative action, which encompasses the other two in that it maintains the creator’s primary state and enacts the secondary reality, leaving its mark through the usage of specific technical factors. It symbolizes the full phenomenon of creativity that the creator witnesses synchronically his creation with the least possible biased perspective. This feature differentiates it from the first phase and proves the integration of the technical factors we analyzed previously. The products resulting from ‘creative boredom’ tie in with this representation of creativity in cases such as those described above, where the radicality of the derived absurd emphasizes on the urge of recently having acted spontaneously under prefiguratively detached observation. We can mention a subtle case as well when the same act of surrendering causes physiological changes in the fluency of the body and mind, which is typical of creative impulses. Instantaneous Creativity promotes the comprehension of boredom that was initiated by avant-​garde artists. It explains how its integration widens from within the subject to the subject’s physical manifestation. On the contrary, it permits one to employ such a manifestation in favor of the integration, in case the subject faces difficulties concerning that issue—​a faculty we will delve into in future research. The enacting conception of boredom that the method bears out simultaneously corresponds to its disillusionment and contributes to its creative dilution in the synergic phenomenon as well as in the constant transformation of life.

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Conclusion

Beyond any debate over the relation between boredom and creativity, insofar as is possible to demonstrate currently, we aimed to outline a practical guide to integrate both into our lives. It was essential to follow up on the traditional impasse between boredom and creativity through the concept of disillusionment and propose its aesthetic and behavioral consequences put forth by the 20th-​ century avant-​garde artists. That is why we conclude with a practical sense of boredom that could lead us to a creative enactment in daily life as the fields of art and pedagogy. The first evidence of this approach is that, although we have not provided specific definitions, the creative model, underlying the continuity of boredom, neutralizes its typological controversy. Every vision is necessary for the enrichment of the research. Moreover, it is useful, although unnecessary, to achieve complete enactment. These visions are complementary when we realize that we create boredom. For instance, profound boredom is not a separate type of simple and everyday boredom. Instead, it denotes a deeper level of conscious knowledge about it, which, in turn, is not another interpretation. Boredom neutralizes every attempt to escape it because it is mostly neutral. This compelled us to employ the concept of disillusionment to elaborate on how the aesthetic nature of boredom offers two visions of reality: first, the utterly well-​known shortage of deception, and second, the unnoticed abundance of the one who finds oneself to be a part of the world, not just because one has access to it or uses it as a tool at will but because, in their noetic radicality, one senses the beginning of that great creation—​the world is already our will. Boredom does not guarantee creativity because it springs from an illusory model of consciousness. However, it can be employed creatively, which, before the disappearance of its roots, refers to egoism. Meanwhile, it can function as an unavoidable gap, a balm for modern excess, or even provide access to the divine. In other words, it can be whatever we want it to be. However, when we have the good fortune to observe it innocently, all we can see is a falling mask of disillusionment.

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of Boredom in Artistic Practice], Dissertation, Sculpture Department, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Velasco Caballero, S. (2018). Saltos apáticos: la integración protoperformativa del aburrimiento en la vanguardia histórica española [Apathetic Leaps: The Protoperformative Integration of Boredom in the Spanish Historical Avant-​garde]. In: M. Molina, ed., Protoperformance en España (1834–​1964). Lucena: Weekend Proms. Washburn, M. (1994). Transpersonal Psychology in Psychoanalytic Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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A Cartography of Boredom: Reading for Affectivity in Contemporary Poetry Kristiine Kikas Abstract Having emerged from a research associated with reading for affectivity in poetry, and the question of the applicability of the method to critical inquiry as one concerned with the level of impersonal intensities, this chapter is an attempt at exemplifying how the Deleuzian/​Zourabichvilian ‘affirmation of chance,’ in the form of an ‘irrational’ reading, could be useful in the enhancing of thought, and, through that practice exercise, what Rosi Braidotti calls an ‘affirmative ethics’—​a notion central to posthumanist theory. The nonconformist method takes boredom as its object due to its ambiguous status and dogmatic reception both in-​and outside the academic discourse.

Keywords affect –​ boredom –​ cartography –​ Deleuze –​ posthumanism –​ Zourabichvili

1

Introduction

It could be argued that, if not the rise, the maintained level of interest in phenomena such as and similar to boredom—​experiences known and recognizable, that have seemingly received sufficient attention, yet the disquisitions of which appear to be lacking—​is connected to the emergence of a number of what Rosi Braidotti calls “contemporary knowledge practices” (2018, p. 17)—​a variety of trans-​disciplinary studies which focus on the decentering of human and address vitalist and materialist affectivity (2018, p. 16) in exercising their qualitative research conducted on the verge of science and creativity. While scholars have not thus far established the category of boredom, the ‘majoritarian’ scientific approaches tend to view boredom as a consuming state, on the one hand, or a trait, an emotion, or desire—​often accompanied by “bodily responses and actions,”—​as a particular proneness, on the other hand

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_014

258 Kikas (Martin, Sadlo and Stew, 2006, p. 196). The “minor science” may, for instance, regard boredom as matter (Anderson, 2004, p. 740) and, therefore, recognize it as a process, quite unlike the consistent character of a “state” (e.g. Martin, et al., 2006, pp. 193, 204) previously attributed to boredom. This chapter sets a twofold goal as it seeks to explicate that boredom is an evolving affective process, and hopes to do so by approaching a poem not as a representation but possibly as an embodiment of boredom which exerts active intensities in the immediacy of reading. In what follows, first, the germination of posthumanist ideas in the work of philosopher Lars Svendsen will be probed and connected to the materialist affective approach of cultural-​political geographer Ben Anderson. The aim is not to categorize boredom or give an extensive survey of its historical background. It is to pave the way for the close reading of the poem in the second half of this chapter. Through employing non-​representational methods in reading Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored” (1994, see Annex I), the possibility of the mapping of an instance of boredom as a process will be demonstrated, deeming the capacity of the latter, in doing so, more effective than that of the two accounts compared and contrasted above. 2

Two Accounts of Boredom with a Hint of Posthumanist Theory

In his historical-​philosophical tour, A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen, like others before him, acknowledges the bifold model of boredom as an inescapable mood and also humans’ proneness to be bored (2005). He sees, the main reason for the latter, especially among contemporary population, to lie with the inheritance of Romanticism—​the individual’s desire for personal existential (Svendsen, 2005) meaning or content in life—​yet, experienced more severely now due to the lack of a grand goal which, in Romanticism, was the characteristic “hyperbolic faith […] in the ability of the imagination to transform the world” (Svendsen, 2005, pp. 12–​13). The inability to set such goals at present could be the result of the incapacitating effect of the flood of information that has already been filtered and interpreted (Svendsen, 2005), for humans as “world-​forming being[s]‌that actively constitute [their] own world, […] lose friction in relation to the world” when “the active constituting of [it] is made superfluous” (Svendsen, 2005, pp. 31–​32). In her work about posthumanities, Braidotti uses the Deleuzian term of “missing people,” aiming at a framework for critical inquiry concerning those1 1 This grouping, besides “indigenous knowledge systems, […] feminists, queers, otherwise enabled, non-​humans or technologically-​mediated existences” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 21), includes

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who are “empirically missing—​even from ‘minor science’ [in order to] get constituted as political subjects of knowledge” (2018, p.  21). Although intended in an altogether different context, it could be said that the modern ‘humans-​ Romantics,’ as viewed by Svendsen, have become, although self-​inflictingly, such empirically ‘missing people’—​banished from constituting their world and in need of a reformation of thought. Svendsen explicitly concludes his oeuvre by insisting that to come to terms with boredom—​a manifestation of being ‘missing’—​it ought to be rationally recognized as an integral part of one’s life and be accepted just as readily as the alternating exciting moments (2005, p. 154). However, he does not offer specifics for integrating the advice into daily practice. On the other hand, throughout the book, Svendsen explains his ideas by quoting ambiguous poetic material (e.g., Pessoa and Beckett), which, subsequently, leaves his explanations ambiguous as well. Therefore, his standpoint might be interpreted either as disfavoring of the Romantic perspective and favoring of the preceding age of great collective goals instead of personal ones. Alternatively, one could understand the cited texts as attempts to explain the conditions for opposing boredom on a ‘non-​egotistic’ level. Namely, Svendsen contends that subjectivity, along with one’s lack of satisfaction in self-​ realization is not only the cause but also the necessary condition for boredom: The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization. Boredom presupposes subjectivity, i.e., self-​awareness. […] [a]‌subject demands meaning of the world and himself. Without such a demand for meaning there would be no boredom (2005, p. 32). As was already noted above, this can indicate that boredom should be regarded as a natural part of human life, for there is no life without subjectivity. Nevertheless, Svendsen also appears to imply a possibility of an existence without the demand for meaning(s) that alternates with ‘life-​with-​subjectivity.’ Or perhaps, that a different form of subjectivity, one that is in contact with “something essential,” may also occur: “[b]‌oredom is connected to reflection, and in all reflection there is a tendency towards a loss of world. Reflection decreases via diversions, but this will always be a passing phenomenon” (Svendsen, 2005, p. 33). The secret (or, when seeking a cure for boredom—​the solution) behind “non-​human agents, technologically-​mediated elements, earth-​others (land, waters, plants, animals) and non-​human inorganic agents (plastic, wires, information highways, algorithms, etc.)” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 22).

260 Kikas contacting and maintaining the contact with that ‘something essential’ lies in the sensing of the worth of one’s small daily activities (“[t]edium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing” [Pessoa, quoted in Svendsen, 2005, p. 35]). Such a condition would not last, but in being alternated by the moments of reflection and dissatisfaction, may contribute to the general process of individuation. One might be able to justify this viewpoint by the conclusive remarks in A Philosophy of Boredom, in which Svendsen declares the non-​ existence of Meaning [Svendsen’s capitalization] and advises accepting boredom to allow the small but significant moments of excitement to outweigh it: “[t]he absence of great Meaning does not, however, result in all meaning in life evaporating. […] A source of profound boredom is that we demand capital letters where we are obliged to make do with small ones” (2005, p. 154). Svendsen’s assertion that acknowledging this viewpoint is a matter of maturity or adulthood, and the simultaneous note on the difficulty of becoming mature or adult (2005, p. 149), may be taken as a hint at the complexity of the task. Having drawn a parallel between the minoritarian subject and a contemporary human-​Romantic (struggling with boredom) allows us to notice a similar goal, i.e., groundedness in the present that would enable a qualitative shift in posthumanities (Braidotti, 2018, p. 9). According to Braidotti, the named shift can, among other features, be facilitated by “affirmative ethics,” which is a required part of cartographies2 in mapping the “complexities of the present” via creativity and imagination, which constantly reconnects to the virtual totality of a block of past experiences and affects, which get recomposed as action in the present, thereby realizing their unfulfilled potential. This mode of affirmative critique is an exercise in temporary and contingent synchronization, which sustains, in the present, the activity of actualizing the virtual. This virtual intensity is simultaneously after and before us, both past and future, in a flow or process of mutation, differentiation or becoming, which is the vital material core of thought (2018, p. 7). In his embodied affective materialist research, Ben Anderson (2004), precisely by focusing on the minutiae of the actions and reactions of the interviewees as well as the materiality involved in the situations, demonstrates that the matter 2 Braidotti defines ‘cartography’ as a “theoretically-​based and politically-​informed account of the present that aims at tracking the production of knowledge and subjectivity […] and to expose power both as entrapment (potestas) and as empowerment (potentia)” (2018, p. 3).

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of boredom can be approached from the New Materialist viewpoint—​one that Braidotti sees as belonging with and working towards the posthumanist viewpoint. Following Deleuze, Anderson finds that boredom is felt, first and foremost, as a suspension of the habitual intensities that are affirmed only secondarily on the subjective level as a statement or evaluation of one being bored (2004). Interestingly, Svendsen deems it possible to be bored without one being conscious of it (2005, p. 14). Habit, however, is often viewed as monotonous, repetitive, tedious—​the terms generally connected to the everyday. O’Sullivan believes habit to be an “extreme form [that] staples us to the present and stymies access to [the] realm of potentiality (indeed, typical subjectivity is a habit, constituted as it is by a bundle of repeated reactions)” (2013, p. 166). Opposing such a perspective in implying that habit is, on the contrary, the “inhabitation of the body’s potential capacities” (2004, p. 747) that has, for some reason, been interrupted, Anderson implies that boredom does not reside in a specific kind of activity or an activity lacking creativity. Instead, habit—​even if repetitive—​possibly induces the forgetting of what Svendsen saw as the ‘egotistic’ self-​awareness. When staleness of the repeated action befalls, the «forgetting» intrinsic to habit has been momentarily incapacitated. It is the unraveling of habit, a sudden realization of the gain of «just chopping», that is passed through to enable boredom to settle. The «hidden» effects of habit are momentarily disrupted so that repetition is thereafter felt like a «bare» reiterative dulling presence in itself (Anderson, 2004, p. 743). The two pieces of research seem to reciprocally agree on the possibility of the “losing of the world”—​the distancing from the immediacy of the present experience—​sometimes seen as the direct cause of boredom. It also unravels that Anderson does not categorize boredom as a static ‘thing’ but a disruption of energetic flow that “acts as a barrier against the formation of certain relations with aspects of immediate experience” (2004, p.  744). Noting that the situation is temporary might indicate the possibility of restoring the formation of the hidden relations. It would only be accurate to mention that such an approach does not promote unchanging ugly sameness. Namely, to illustrate the difference between two kinds of sameness—​that described and strove towards by the mystics, and the other so painfully experienced as boredom—​Svendsen resorts to Simone Weil’s descriptions of the first as the beautiful eternal sameness, and the second as the ugly unchangeable one (2005). On the level of intensities, the restoring of the normal flow does not necessarily have to be induced by the same activity that preceded. Based on this materialist affective

262 Kikas approach, the difference between samenesses seems not to be predesignated by the status of the experiencer (e.g., mystic vs. layman) or in setting the grand aim in experiencing sublimity vs. being trapped in pursuing personal ‘egotistic’ goals. Instead, it lays in the (in)obstructed flow—​or productivity of intensities. One can see that the obstructiveness figures a process in the form of tension, first, in the bodily fidgeting and restlessness (Svendsen, 2005; Anderson, 2004), and second, also in the reactive activities even if manifested intuitively—​or felt “ephemerally” (Anderson, 2004, p. 750). It is not uncommon that the search for aesthetic intensities to shake the “dulling presence” is manifested in a not wholly formed or articulated (non-​reflective) manner (Svendsen, 2005, p. 27; see also Anderson, 2004). Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that, although on several occasions Svendsen acknowledges the potentiality of the moment of boredom as generative and creative (e.g., 2005), he condemns aesthetic experiences to be among the instant self-​deceptive means for defying boredom, deeming them to operate purely on the level of potency that is at work on the surface, and tends to “fall back into boredom” (2005, p. 27). “Boredom is not connected with actual needs but with desire. Moreover, this desire is a desire for sensory stimuli. Stimuli are the only ‘interesting’ thing” (2005, p. 27). Svendsen’s diminutive attitude towards the spark generated by a disjunctive move to aesthetics might appear as contentious considering his final note of the eventual lack of one ‘great’ meaning and the importance of valuing the smaller ones. However, controversially, it is precisely in the light of the Meaning—​the one for which he reproaches not to wait as it will never arrive, and because of which the Romantic is not able to accept and cope with profound boredom—​ that Svendsen could be seen to agree with Anderson. It is more often than not that one copes with boredom in the most subtle and unconscious ways (Anderson, 2004, p. 748): The movement to the not-​yet that takes place as part of the bored time-​ space often involves a much more subtle re-​alignment of the ephemeral insignificancies of daily life via acts of diversion, distraction or discernment. For example, boredom may be countered by a simple act of turning on or off a song, switching channels on the television or finding that attention has suddenly wandered. […] This indicates that boredom is now felt as much as potentiality, or possibility, as actuality and is therefore associated with a whole series of non-​cognitive «coping mechanisms». Should this active suspension (experienced by the contemporary Romantics in the lack of one ‘great’ personal Meaning) be sensed as emptiness, then according to Anderson, it could be viewed as an in-​betweenness belonging to neither

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subject nor object (2004). Hence, when regarding an in-​betweenness as liminal, as transitional—​i.e., an instance of generating newness—​he does provide it with creative potential. In terms of New Materialism, Anderson acknowledges the Deleuzian idea of life as becoming, as multiplicity (2004). However, while stating that boredom is a process, Anderson rests at merely exemplifying the restlessness and the potential to change from boredom to something other, still considering the ignitive moves to otherness as disjunctive from dysphoric boredom which is ultimately lacking and is not desirable, acceptable or co-​ habitable. Despite his seeing potential in emptiness, Anderson’s analysis of his empirical material does not map sufficiently what Braidotti’s cartography seems to call for, not providing an account of the present that traces the production of knowledge and subjectivity (2018). As was already mentioned, an essential aspect of posthumanist theory (together with the mainly vitalist New Materialist approaches) is an affirmative, generative ethics—​the ethics of potential. While what Braidotti expects to be affirmed is the collective over the self, the non-​human over human, the ‘minor science’ alongside the ‘majoritarian,’ the grounds of a new thought, however, is not merely making space for the ‘missing people.’ Instead, it is the imaginative generative manner, in which the connection to the “stuff of the world” can be facilitated in the immanence of thought, that “pursues the actualization of transversal relations, inhabited by a vitalist and materialist multi-​directional affectivity” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 16). The second part of this chapter attempts to exemplify, through a reading for affectivity in a poem, how the emergence of sense in the immediacy of reading may provide controversial results in contrast to conventional reading. The next section will, thus, after a brief introduction to the act of reading poetry as a posthumanist practice, undertake a reading of the poem “Bored,” by Margaret Atwood, which, apart from being broken into lines, could conventionally be read as a piece of prose that explicitly depicts what Anderson might call the materialist affective relations of boredom. 3

The Affirmative Reading of ‘Bored’

The non-​representational method employed in the current reading for affective intensities, resorts to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of blocks of sensations, in which he considers words as the units of language to be the ‘physical’ material of poetry, the task of which is to mediate sensations. Sensations are impersonal intensities, which are accumulated in and exerted by any work of art (2009). Thus, words here are not seen to be denotative, but rather, to produce experiences during an encounter between the reader and the poem. Such

264 Kikas experiences are not quite yet subject to rational analysis, i.e., they emerge before subjective evaluations and opinions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; 2009). Due to the elusive nature of the immediacy of affect, although possible to be experienced, it is considered difficult to be expressed afterward and inserted into the critical discourse. To tackle that problem, one has to attend to the sense that arises from the affective encounter (Kikas, forthcoming). “Sense,” here, does not denote the content of the poem, the rational syntactic, or the semiotic meaning, but “an immanent logic of forces” that, according to Zourabichvili, challenges us to “affirm chance” (2012, p. 57). Such ‘affective logic,’ according to media theorist Andrew Murphy, can be noticed when not seeking for grand meanings contributing to grand endings (2014). Moreover, Murphy emphasizes the urgency to pay attention to the details that contribute to smaller ends or might not even contribute to any ends at all. According to him, one can do it, for instance, by attending to the elements in a work of art that create ambiguity. Drawing from that, to describe the layers of intensities behind the (rational) content of the poem, the plethora of possibilities evoked by a poem’s material—​but also by the past and present lived experiences and the encyclopedic knowledge of the reader—​is addressed. In the form of the poem, i.e., broken into lines, via focusing on the poem’s material—​which, alongside words, is also the lack of them, silence, line breaks, indents, and spacing, but also the ambiguities produced by the collocation of not only words but all the elements that comprise a poem—​it exerts a different layer of sense that occasionally does and yet, on some occasions, does not collide with the rational ‘intended’ meaning. That is the layer that does not reveal a representational meaning but, most certainly, even if not acknowledged, affects the reading. To access it, a kind of trust, or, as Zourabichvili notes, an affirmation of chance (Aarons, 2012) is necessary. The positioning of trust into the irrational. Zourabichvili uses the notion of the irrational not in the sense of illogicism but as a mode of considering the outside of established and generally accepted, often dogmatic, thought—​that which purely referential logic dismisses (Aarons, 2012). This Deleuzian stance, that sees logical propositions only to “consider […] empty reference in itself as simple truth value, [and can therefore only be applied] to already constituted states of affairs or bodies, in established scientific propositions or in factual propositions […] or in simple opinions” (2009, p. 138), seems also to be (if not directly, then indirectly) the grounds for the cartography that is considered able to map the complexity of processes of and in the present. To exemplify the irrational reading for sensation and sense, first, the sonorous affect, creating an outline for different mindsets, will be described. Second, the ways in which the rhyme scheme contributes to the sonorous pattern

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will be regarded. Finally, the chapter will provide an example of the irrational reading, discussing, whether and if so, in what way the particles of sense produced in the process exert the sensation of boredom in the poem. Also, as according to William James there is no such thing as affect pure (2014)—​even the most abrupt interruption or presentation of a new sensation is still modified by the sensation that preceded—​the affirmative reading would also seek to exemplify that boredom is never ‘boredom pure’ but a sensation modified by collocating sensations. 3.1 The Sonorous Traces and Irrationality In Atwood’s poem (1994), a recognizable repetition of the short vowel sound of ‘o,’ as in the word ‘bored,’ occurs in the first fourteen lines (e.g. “bored” [1 and 7], “boards” [4]‌, “boredom” [12], “small” [13], and “worn” [14]). This is supported by the less recognizable slightly shorter sound as in ‘log,’ in the former’s vicinity, as if an echo (e.g., “log” [2], “sawed” [3], “or” [5, 8, and 9], and “for” [6]). At the beginning of the poem, the ‘o’ sound, as in the word ‘bored,’ is present as an end rhyme after every two lines (1, 4, and 7). The rhyming pattern exists within the first nine lines, with the echoing shorter sounds within the two unrhymed lines in between—​in the very first instance, one posited at the end of the second line as not quite a pure rhyme (2 and 3, 5 and 6, 8 and 9). In the tenth line, not only is the expectancy of the particular end rhyme failed, but the pattern of the internal echoing short ‘o’ sound words in lines is broken as well. Instead, the ‘or’ sound words of ‘boredom’ and ‘worn’ are internally used in the twelfth and fourteenth lines, whereas ‘small,’ in the thirteenth line, reestablishes the end rhyme just for one last instance. The falling apart of the rhyme pattern seems to be predicted by the end rhyme in brackets (7). Within the same span of lines, also a similar pattern of long ‘i’ words emerges as a supportive structure, in quite the same frequency as the ‘o’ words described above (“times” [1]‌, “mind” [2], “while” [3, 4, and 10], and “myopia” [14]). The word ‘times’ (1) is in the plural, intended to indicate that such an occasion of boredom was a repeated one. However, the word itself, by containing the singular word ‘time,’ along with the following long ‘i’ sounds, invokes the sensation of the longevity of time drawling. That the first ten lines exert one specific kind of boredom is affirmed by the repetitive employment of more both short and long vowels in mainly monosyllabic words in the same number of lines, e.g., the short ‘i’ sound in “it” (3, 11, and 12), “string” and “he” (4), “distances between things” (5), “into” (6), “which” (7), “In” (8), and “still in” (9). Although there are also recurring long ‘e’ and ‘o’ sounds and short ‘a’ sounds, the frequency of short ‘i’ sound exceeds others. Within lines 15–​23, a different kind of sonority emerges—​there is a clear transition from vowels to consonant

266 Kikas clusters:  sounds like “crumbs” (16), “granular” (16), “igneous” (17), “dry” (18), “graying” (18), “bristles” (19), and “whistle” (20) occur. It is noteworthy that, on the verge of that change in the fifteenth line—​“the intricate twill of the seat”—​ the short ‘i’ sound is repeated three times, then emphasized by the long ‘e’ and also already combined with the change of attention in the word ‘intricate.’ The first affective image in Atwood’s poem is in the graphic placement of the endings of the first and the second line (“bored” [1]‌and “Holding the log” [2]). As a result of the positions of the line breaks, proximity of the words “[…] bored/​[…] log” (1–​2) is achieved, due to which the assumed figurative origin of the word ‘bored’—​the sensation of “mov[ing] forward slowly and persistently” as a boring tool into the log—​is exerted (Bored). The next irrational instances arise from what we might call a syntactically “inaccurate” comma after “measured” in the fourth line. Namely, “boards” and “distances between things” are supplementary information about what is being measured. Considering that it is a compound sentence, where commas already serve the purpose of separating the two actions undertaken (those of measuring and pounding), other forms of punctuation (dashes, parentheses) would conventionally be used. By the employment of commas, instead—​but also via eyeing a kind of tautology triggered by “Holding the log” in the second line—​creates a sense of a list within the next few lines—​a sequence of things being held: holding “strings,” “boards,” and “distances.” Subsequently, due to the syntactic ‘error’ and the misreading of the list effected by the graphic placement (3 and 4), a tangle of viewpoints between who is holding “strings,” “boards,” and “distances,” and who measures (and what is being measured), evokes the sense of distances between things (of the world) and the bored poetic I; and, perhaps, between the one who measured—​as intended in the rational reading—​and the poetic  I. This is enhanced by the word “pounded” (6), foregrounded due to the line break, evoking the archaic meaning of the word—​being trapped or imprisoned—​ without explicitly mentioning entrapment. The third end rhyme “bored” (7) in parentheses—​besides, merely hinting the disintegration of the established rhyme scheme—​effectuates an impending change in the perspective within the experience of boredom. Instead of sensing boredom “as though a hole is being bored through boards,” the short vowel ‘a’ creates the mimicry or mocking of the sense of repetition. The line break after “sat in the back” (8) underlines the activity (or rather the lack of it), not the place. Although syntactically the “prow, stern, wheel” (10) belong, again, with the “he” (11), the positioning of the nouns (“prow, stern, wheel”) below the next occasion of sitting—​“sat still in boats” (9)—​and the pronoun at the beginning of the eleventh line allows the number of places

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where the poetic I had to sit to be extended. Furthermore, another syntactically inappropriate comma (in the similar sense as in the previous occasion) after “boats” (9), strips the repetitive “sat, sat” (10) of the voluntariness, and produces (attributing it also to the preceding two phrases) the sense of submitting to a commandment, or even the sense of having been placed (as if the poetic I was sat by someone), which then reaches back to the “distances between things” (5), identifying the poetic I as an object, as well. The involuntary sitting resonates with the word ‘pounded’—​imprisoned—​above, in line number five. The positioning of lines continues to invoke the echoing or even the rhythmic reappearance of the words and create collocation throughout the whole poem, some of them rather violent images of boredom (e.g., “my mind” above “he sawed it” [2 and  3]). Considering that these constitute as smaller ends (Murphy, 2014) and do not contribute to the grander conclusive idea presented at the end of the irrational reading, they are, on the current occasion, not discussed. The following, likewise tangling effect, produced by the placing of the pronoun ‘he’ at the beginning of the eleventh line, emphasizes the shift from the inactivity of the poetic I to ‘his’ activity: “he drove, steered, paddled” (11). The line break after “It” (11), first, gives the sense of it belonging to the phrase “he drove, steered, paddled” (11) as an impersonal pronoun for the boat. Second, separating the expletive ‘it’ from the rest of the intended phrase conjoins the following thought to what ‘he’ is doing, instead of conveying the entrapment and boredom of the poetic I—​as if ‘his’ activities did not constitute as boredom. In that way, once again, the two viewpoints become entangled but, this time, leading into the state of losing self-​awareness, diminishing the distance between the poetic I and the ‘things.’ To be more precise, the graphical positioning of the “wasn’t even” (12), below the pronoun “he” (11), creates the sense of ‘his’ state of mind—​the poetic I’s wonderment of his repetitive action through an as-​if-​misprinted ‘bored,’ not ‘boring’ (“He wasn’t even bored”). The attention of the poetic I is through no apparent cause guided away from egotistic self-​reflection and from being obsessively bored and is attached to someone/​something other. That, then, is followed by a move from noticing ‘him’ to being lost in the details, losing self-​awareness, and of the poetic I “becoming” the details experienced (14–​19). The shift in register from the simpler informal stylistics of a child to the more complex—​perhaps even poetic—​style of adults sustains the affective change. It does not necessarily indicate that the one who was bored was a child since the ‘rational’ reading plants a knowledge or a sense of the poetic I being of an age when one can “hardly wait to get/​the hell out of there to/​anywhere else” (33–​35). Besides giving evidence of youth, immaturity, or lack of education, single-​syllable words may, according to

268 Kikas Richard Hugo (1982), be illustrative of “rigidity, honesty, toughness, relentlessness, the world of harm unvarnished.” The multisyllabic vocabulary, in contrast, carrying a softening quality, may invoke “compassion, tenderness, and tranquility.” Nevertheless, Hugo also agrees to longer words eliciting a more civilized air. The twentieth line sees the shift in attention back from the detail to ‘him,’ and, in lines 22–​24, back to the sensing of repetition. Contrasting the activity of verbs to the enamoring of the nouns (and adjectives), and exerting the sensation of the almost-​inactivity of myopia being more intensely alluring than the physical activity, carefully introduces the latter through the use of verbs again which, by the accompanying cautious “would” and timid “sometimes” (20), characterizes ‘him’ and ‘his’ conduct as soft and thoughtful. Distancing the word “sometimes” (20) from the words “I would” (21), by the use of a line break, and also mentioning ‘rhythm’ (which might indicate musicality and, through that, being less bored now), produces the experience of hesitation in admitting to the enjoyment (“whistling” [20]) of the circumstances. The return to the repetition of boredom that instead seems as psychosomatic—​ the poetic I remembers her/​his attitude—​re-​awakens the sonorous pattern of the stylistic restlessness of short ‘i’ words: “whistle” (20), “things” (22), and “dishes” (24). The gaining of the force of active verbs by graphic placement (“doing/​[…] carrying/​[…] drying” [21–​3]) accompanies the evolvement from the ‘myopia’ of things into the ‘minutiae’ of repetitive activities. The word ‘minutiae’ produces such a sense by inhabiting a sole complete sentence in the twentieth line, placed at once in the middle of two incomplete sentences, and, at the same time, between what ‘he’ and the poetic I are doing (“doing/​[…] carrying/​ […] drying” [21–​3]) and what the animals always do (“ferrying/​[…] shuffling” [25, 26]). In a rational reading, the effects previously evoked—​the patterns of repetition and the connotation of the quality of boredom—​are in an echoing way carried on to this part of the poem not only via the sequence of daily activities but also via phrases like “grain by grain” (26)—​although repetitive, being so in a subtly different manner. That is what could, after William James, be called a “lingering effect” (2014, p. 571). However, when regarding the stylistics and sound patterns after the stative “Such minutiae” (24), what the poetic I still regards to be ‘boredom’ has progressed from a momentary relapse to the loss of self-​awareness, to the ‘myopia’ of noticing “the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under/​the nail” (29–​30): the similar kind of myopia is exercised by animals when “ferrying the sand, grain by grain” (26). Conveying these thoughts has abandoned the contrasting of rebellious style versus that of civilized through both the stylistic classifications and the presenting of these

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attitudes graphically. Instead, in describing the natural activity of animals, a more conversationalist style is employed. As the rest of the poem reflects about boredom, rather than depicting and invoking the sense of it, the last ten lines are relevant in terms of their value as statements, rather than considering the affects that they produce. The poetic I seems to admit to having self-​inflicted the boredom, which is evident in her/​ his questioning of the truthfulness of the negativity of the situation: “Why do I remember it as sunnier/​all the time then, although it more often/​rained, and more birdsong?” (30–​32). The answer “Perhaps though/​boredom is happier” (35–​36), not an interrogation but a statement, could be understood in several ways. For instance, it might be a suggestion that boredom is, indeed, a happier feeling or state than how it is generally perceived. In the light of the sense emerging from the reading for affect, the proposition this chapter settles is: the poetic I contends that boredom, as depicted by her/​him, is the ‘happy’ manner of existing when compared to ‘knowing too much,’ as delivered in the last lines. The relation of happiness and boredom supports this claim: “It is for dogs or /​groundhogs” (36–​37). The impersonal pronoun creates an ambiguity concerning whether it refers to boredom or happiness. When taking into account the proposition that boredom, in the context of this particular poem, is a happier feeling, the ambiguity appears only to contribute to a rational reading3 and to serve the purpose of making the affective intensities less obvious. Hence, considering both happiness and boredom, as one, to be for groundhogs and dogs, attributes more complex expectations to the ‘knowledge’ referred to in the last two lines of the poem. Namely, what is expressed is that the poetic I would no longer be bored, i.e., happy as “Now [she/​he] would know too much./​Now [she/​he] would know” (38–​39). When looking at the possibility of feeling happy as being contented with what chance brings along, comfortable with the present situation, then by admitting to the possibility of boredom as being the happier mode of thought, could be admitting to being in touch with the present moment 3 The indefinite article used indicates that even if taken in face value, i.e., in reading the poem as a narrative or a prose text, the ending is up to interpretation. Due to the lack of material in academia concerning this particular poem, some non-​scientific receptions are available as online commentary to the poem. Most of these demonstrate boredom here is as the youth’s inability to appreciate either the conditions provided by the parents or the complexity of the parents’ life. The poem, therefore, is seen, first and foremost, as the analeptic view of an older poetic I, who, after having gained sufficient knowledge, is or would now be able to appreciate similar situations whether because of not longer allowing oneself to be bored in such a situation or for knowing the responsibilities behind the work involved in jobs and child-​rearing, as well as the appropriateness of considering someone’s feelings.

270 Kikas and less so with one’s self-​awareness. The ‘knowledge’ could, then, be linked to the acquired excessive factual encyclopedic knowledge, but also to maturity as “establishing a self” (Svendsen, 2005, p. 151). The latter, as mentioned in the first half of the chapter, is bound in the search for self-​realization and reflection, which, subsequently, tends to lead the hindered connection with the present. Eventually, what is revealed by the presented reading for affect is, perhaps, a lament for the innocence of childhood that grants both the ability and the right to be happy in boredom. 4

Conclusion

The current chapter sets out as an attempt at reading for affect in Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored” (1994), hoping to explicate that a creative work about boredom—​which, as argued by Deleuze, has accumulated the sensations of a specific circumstance—​may reveal what a mind of those caught in established modes of thinking might, through a simple reading or by a hermeneutic analysis of narrative, not notice. Therefore, in attending to the sensations immanent to the poem via an irrational method—​a method that does not oppose the rational by permitting illogicism, but is bound to question the “outside” of conventional thought (Zourabichvili, 2012, p. 45)—​the possibility of seeing boredom in a different light, at least in this particular situation, was expected. What occurred as a result is that even when, e.g., by New Materialist approach, boredom was regarded as active, the activity was limited to physical restlessness and tension that reflected the negativity of hindered energetics; also, when considered to hold potential, the latter lie in triggering disjunctive moves from the negativity of boredom. As the affective reading illustrated, negativity alone does not constitute what humans-​Romantics may call boredom. The in-​between moments of connecting to the present, which neither contribute to the realization of personal goals nor manifest as exciting, are often categorized regarding pervading personal and subjective evaluation of the circumstances. However, given another perspective, these moments might be able to either contribute to the evaluation of the current situation—​like in Atwood’s poem—​or facilitate an instant change in impending personal goals. Although seemingly trivial or insignificant in the greater context of majoritarian science, the present chapter hopes, in the framework of the posthumanist theory and the problematic of the human-​centeredness, to have, in a modest way, made space for the new thought on the level of everyday subtleties and a supposedly non-​problematic case.

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Bibliography

Aarons, K. (2012). The Involuntarist Image of Thought. In:  F. Zourabichvili, ed., Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, pp.1–​18. Anderson, B. (2004). Time-​stilled Space-​slowed: How Boredom Matters. Geoforum 35, pp. 739–​754. doi: 10.1016/​j.geoforum.2004.02.005. Atwood, M. (1994). Bored. The Atlantic Monthly 274 (6), p. 102. Braidotti, R. (2018). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, pp. 1–​31. doi: 10.1177/​0263276418771486. Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2009). What is Philosophy? London: Verso. Hugo, R. (1982). Writing Off the Subject. In: The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. London: W.W. Norton and Co, pp. 3–​10. James, W. (2014). The Principles of Psychology. iBooks. Accessed 09/​30/​2018. http://​ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/​j/​james/​william/​principles/​index.html. Kikas. K. (forthcoming). Reading for Senseation in Poetry. Deleuze and Guattari Studies. Martin, M., Sadlo, G., and Stew, G. (2006). The Phenomenon of Boredom. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3, pp. 193–​211. doi: 10.1191/​1478088706qrp066oa. Murphy, A. (2014). Making Sense: The Transformation of Documentary by Digital and Networked Media. Studies in Documentary Film 8 (3), pp. 188–​204. doi:  10.1080/​ 17503280.2014.961631. O’Sullivan, S. (2013). A Diagram of the Finite-​Infinite Relation: Towards a Bergsonian Production of Subjectivity. In: J.Ó. Maoilearca, and C. De Mille, eds., Bergson and the Art of Immanence:  Painting, Photography, Film. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, pp. 165–​187. Svendsen, L. (2005). A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books. Zourabichvili, F. (2012). Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Annex i “Bored,” Margaret Atwood (1994) All those times I was bored out of my mind. Holding the log while he sawed it. Holding the string while he measured, boards,

272 Kikas distances between things, or pounded stakes into the ground for rows and rows of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored) weeded. Or sat in the back of the car, or sat still in boats, sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel he drove, steered, paddled. It wasn’t even boredom, it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details. Myopia. The worn gunwales, the intricate twill of the seat cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-​fans of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying bristles on the back of his neck. Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes I would. The boring rhythm of doing things over and over, carrying the wood, drying the dishes. Such minutiae. It’s what the animals spend most of their time at, ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels, shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed such things out, and I would look at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier all the time then, although it more often rained, and more birdsong? I could hardly wait to get the hell out of there to anywhere else. Perhaps though boredom is happier. It is for dogs or groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored. Now I would know too much. Now I would know.

­c hapter 13

Boredom and Institutional Critique Judy Freya Sibayan Abstract After 19 years, I write again about art and boredom from a very personal perspective. Ever since I  left making art for the conventional art gallery (the white cube) some 24 years ago, my boredom with much of the local art world has always confounded me. I have always been anxious about this disinterest which I often feared might be an arrogance dismissive of a kind of art not worthy of my attention. But in reading again Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind, I have recently come to a full understanding of my weariness of and disengagement from much of the art being produced in Manila. My decision to do Institutional Critique is a result of a crisis of faith in art making, a situation that required me to call into crisis the institution of art production.

Keywords art institution –​boredom –​institutional critique –​weariness

I recently concluded doing Moving House, Unpacking a Life of Critical Art Making, a site-​specific work in Calle Wright originally a house, now converted into a space for art. It has been 13 years since I last produced a major work in the city where I have lived and worked for the most part of my life. Moving House is my first major work produced in Manila since 2005. It is important to state this here because I was never really sure I would ever find a place where I could feel at home presenting the autobiographical works and materials I wanted to install all together that made up Moving House. But visiting Calle Wright for the first time, I knew right away it was going to be a fitting place for Moving House. And because I recently turned 65, sold my home of 12 years and now had to move house, it was time to travel light. Not a white cube, Calle Wright, a space for presenting art but left in its state as a house, is where I ‘moved house’ for a short period of time. It is here where I started dealing with the overwhelming ‘art stuff’ I have lugged around all my life. As a conceptual artist, I never had a

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_015

274 Sibayan studio. Instead, I have always had a study where I keep my books and my archive. I have since donated most of my books to the university where I taught for 30 years. And since I make art that necessarily is not for the art market, there remained the question of what to do with my works and traces of my art making, my self-archive, and the rest of my books. Moving House, Unpacking a Life of Critical Art Making at Calle Wright was a timely opportunity for me to have begun performing the task of sorting and organizing these materials to see what needed to be kept, donated, sold, given, collected by others or thrown away. But beyond the literal sense of unpacking my self-​archive was the more important task of unpacking Moving House, an autobiographical installation art performance as a work of Institutional Critique (IC). Calle Wright as the specific site for Moving House had everything to do with my work of Institutional Critique. Because the work I have done for the past 24 years is a critique of the institution of art, I now hardly produce art for the conventional art gallery. But on the occasion that I do exhibit and perform in white cubes, it is to speak truth to power. Further, ever since I started doing Institutional Critique, my lack of interest in much of the art exhibited in these particular art spaces had always confounded me. I have always been anxious about this disinterest which I often feared might be an arrogance dismissive of a kind of art not worthy of my attention. For it is one thing to refuse or to choose not to produce art for these spaces; it is another thing altogether not to be engaged by the art exhibited in them. However, I have recently come to a full understanding of my boredom, my weariness of much of the art being produced in Manila. An institution of world making, a modality of the social construction of a particular world mostly made instrumental in the maintenance of the dominant class thus the status quo, the institution of art as a whole is hardly ever problematized critically in Philippine art production. That is the source of my deep dissatisfaction with the local art institution to which I belong. Patricia Meyer Spacks author of Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind cites Otto Fenichel’s classic 1934 essay “The Psychology of Boredom” where he writes about “the common property of ‘pathological’ and ‘innocent’ boredom” (1995, p. 4). He suggests that in both situations “something expected does not occur” (1995, p.  4). Meyer Spacks continues on Fenichel’s ideas (1995, p. 5): The cause of pathological boredom lies within; normal boredom derives from inadequacies of the “external world.” Fenichel’s notion that “we have the right to expect” (his italics) helpful stimulation from our environment finds an echo in many subsequent utterances. It articulates a widespread

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20th-​century assumption that helps to generate what it purports to explain. To posit the right of being stimulated virtually guarantees that one from time to time will be “justifiably bored” as the external world proves less than satisfactory. Meyer Spacks, in the chapter of her book on the ethics of boredom, modernism, and questions of value, discusses her study of “a sequence of important novels published between the late nineteenth century and mid-​twentieth century” where she observes, “[d]‌isparate in emphasis, yet they share boredom as a common signifier of ethical crisis. No longer do the acts of refusal inherent in boredom necessarily mark moral inadequacy” (1995, pp. 219, 220). From George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda for example, Meyer Spacks concludes that The polarity of interest and boredom central to [the novel] defines the spiritual potential in a context where people feel far less oriented toward their postmortem destinies […] It also elucidates the inadequacy of a social environment that no longer nourishes its participants (1995, p. 221). I was once at the heart of the local institution of art, a social environment, a cultural site. What then brought me to a state of mind where I found myself no longer having faith in an artworld that very early on readily embraced my artmaking swiftly legitimizing me as an artist? From 1974 to 1987, I was actively exhibiting in a few key galleries in Manila but mostly at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Art Museum where, in 1975, when I was still a junior in college, I had my first one-​person exhibition held in the museum’s principal gallery. And within 13 years, I became the director of this very same museum. Established by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1966 with Imelda Marcos as chairperson, the Cultural Center of the Philippines became one of the first lady’s instruments in sanitizing Marcos’ despotic regime under martial law declared in 1972 and lifted in 1981. But after a contentious win in a snap election in 1981, Marcos held power for another five years. He was eventually deposed in 1986 during the peaceful edsa People Power Revolution. The new government under President Corazon Aquino who was brought to power as a result of this revolution reformed these agencies into more democratic cultural institutions. For its part, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (ccp) established outreach coordinating centers to serve the regions. And the ccp Art Museum opened its gates to the victorious with an exhibition of paintings by the social realists/​activists who produced many of the images used in the streets to protest against Marcos’ dictatorship.

276 Sibayan After this exhibition, Nonon Padilla, the newly appointed director renamed this museum Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines (camp) in honor of Ray Albano who formulated this name. Albano was the longest-​serving director of the ccp Art Museum and was responsible for bringing me into the practice of curatorship. He hired me as a curatorial assistant right after college. In 1987, Padilla was assigned to head the ccp theater department. He recommended me to take over the directorship of camp and to head concurrently the Coordinating Center for the Visual Arts, work that oversaw the center’s resources toward representational adequacy and with these very same resources to be managed for the exhibition of Philippine contemporary art. The former directive was toward democratic inclusivity; the latter toward exclusivity. With two conflicting roles, I found the situation untenable. I resigned two years later in 1989. I did not have the prudence nor the political savvy to negotiate the treacherous terrain of heading the most well-​endowed thus the most powerful contemporary art museum in the country then. Confronted with these realities where by and large artists are dependent on the support and resources of exhibiting institutions for their legitimation, I saw artists as hardly having any agency to make art critical of or outside the imperatives of these institutions. Indeed, as cited by critic Hal Foster (1985), Walter Benjamin as early as 1939 had already concluded “the ‘artistic function’ as we know it today—​the isolated maker of art objects for the market—​is ‘incidental’ to the determination of art by its exhibition (exchange) value” (p. 104). Particular therefore to my situation at the Center/​center of art production, I experienced a gnawing dis-​ease with the monolithic, oppressive, co-​opting, confining, centralized, hierarchized institution of art production. Thus marked the beginning of my disengagement with the inescapably institutionalized production of art. I definitely understood this state of weariness and disinterest as “a state epitomizing the painful and increasingly troubling experience of feeling oneself acted upon rather than active” (Meyer Spacks, 1995, p. 34). In his introduction of Recodings, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Foster points out that the present decay of the Enlightenment project is due […] to “the colonization of the life-​world” by the economic and bureaucratic, technical and scientific spheres, the former thoroughly instrumental, the latter not value-​free so much as value-​oblivious […] both art and criticism become marginal; indeed, this is their function “to represent humane marginality.” And so they are treated as essential but superfluous, as luxuries or nuisances to indulge or dispense with (1985, p. 4).

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Foster continues, art […] is today the plaything of (corporate) patrons whose relation to culture is less one of noble obligation than overt manipulation—​of art as a sign of power, prestige, publicity […] mastery of accumulation is not enough for this class; it must control signification as well. These imperatives to manage art as a sign of power, prestige and publicity, to master the ownership of art, and to control the production of art’s meanings to remain the same in order to produce the value art, necessitates—​in fact makes it compulsory for this dominant class to invest fully in an institution of art where all the agents work repetitively toward the maintenance of the dominant culture with capital generally fueling the art machine. This has its own logic since the institution of art, a field of cultural production as described by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a field of struggles where agents engage in competition for control of interests and resources to be made instrumental in the production of “belief of the value of the work [as] part of the reality of the work” (1993, p. 35). Further, the work of art is a “manifestation of this cultural field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, all the determinism inherent in its structure and functioning are concentrated” (1993, p. 37). Bourdieu concludes that art production is an inter-​textual and inter-​subjective enterprise where works of art are texts (any signifying production that can be ‘read’) related not only to other texts but must eventually be “analyzed, both in relation to other texts and in relation to the structure of the field and to the specific agents involved” (1993, p.  17). The institution of art is a self-​ perpetuating sphere where the symbolic value of art (a value that can easily be translated into symbolic capital) is produced and sustained by an extensive social apparatus—​a belief-producing universe incorporating museums, art galleries, art histories, art studies programs, art consultancies, art archives, international biennials and triennials, art insurance companies, freeports, cultural centers, art fairs, auction houses, architectural firms, art publications, art schools, artist studios, media and PR houses peopled by agents—​artists, critics, art writers, curators, dealers, collectors, auctioneers, conservators, academics, architects, archivists, publishers, historians, public relations and media practitioners, interior and graphic designers, scholars, teachers, editors, art consultants, and art patrons. All make up the institution that produces art where exhibitions “are one of the primary vehicles for artistic production” as pointed out by curator and critic Simon Sheikh with “this activity of exhibition and exhibition making […] largely predictable and repetitious, involved

278 Sibayan in specific circuits and structures as well as economies (both symbolic and real)” (2007, p. 175) and with these modes of display “often […] tiresome, their use-​value given and predictable in an endless repetition of the same formats and intentions” (2007, pp. 180–​181). All these conditions expediently render exhibitions and exhibition making the ideal conveyors of the meanings of art—​the manipulated signifieds the dominant class necessarily ‘capitalize’ on for art to remain basically a symbolic capital. In the Philippines, exhibitions and exhibition making are the primary vehicles for artistic production. But produced repeatedly in the same formats and modes of circulation, these praxes of exhibition making have confined art within the limits imposed by capitalist sociality toward the maintenance of the status quo. To reiterate, this means the local institution of art has hardly ever been critically problematized: how to conceive of art’s subject differently to create new subjectivities and publics; how to produce new meanings beyond those that serve to maintain the dominant culture thus maintain the status quo; how to produce art with a different mode of address to critique dominant formations and power structures? Addressing these problematics, Simon Sheikh in his essay “Constitutive Effects: The Techniques of the Curator” calls into crisis the practice of exhibitions and exhibition making as his focus (2007, pp. 182–​183): An exhibition must imagine a public in order to produce it and to produce a world around it—​a horizon. So, if we are satisfied with the world we have now, we should continue to make exhibitions as always, and repeat the formats and circulations. If, on the other hand, we are not happy with the world we are in, both in terms of the art world and in a broader geopolitical sense, we will have to produce other exhibitions: other subjectivities and other imaginaries. The great division of our times is not between various fundamentalisms, since they all ascribe to the same script (albeit with a different idea of who shall win in the end …) but between those who accept and thus actively maintain the dominant imaginary of society, subjectivity and possibility and those who reject and instead partake in other imaginaries. And in “order to alter the scripts of the existing formats,” Sheikh argues that we need more rather than less reflection on the conception of publics, and the contingencies and histories of various modes of address […] all exhibition making is the making of a public, the imagination of a world […] it is the mode of address that produces the public, and if one tries to

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imagine different publics, different notions of stranger relationality, one must also re(consider) the mode of address, or if you will, the formats of exhibition making (2007, p. 182). The most dominant mode of address or format of exhibition making that has been made instrumental in reducing art to the economic, to the commodity par excellence, and thus to the ultimate symbolic capital is the confinement of art in an almost hermetically sealed space, the hegemonic structure that is the white cube. This space for display and ‘internment’ of art has been extensively critiqued by Brian O’Doherty in his series of seminal essays entitled “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space” first published in Artforum in 1976 and revisited by Sheikh in 2009. Sheikh summarizes O’Doherty’s ideas on the white cube as a space for art conceived as a place free of context, where time and social space are thought to be excluded for the experience of the artworks. It is only through the apparent neutrality of appearing outside of daily life and politics that the works within the white cube can appear to be self-​ contained—​only by being freed from historical time can they attain their aura of timelessness […] The outside world must not come in, so the windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light […] The art is free to take on its life […] with its even walls and its unobtrusive artificial lighting—​a sacred space that (despite its modern design) resembles an ancient tomb, undisturbed by time and containing infinite riches. It was constructed in order to give the artworks a timeless quality (and thus lasting value) in both economic and political sense. It was a space for the immortality of a certain class […] as well as a staging ground for objects of sound economic investment for possible buyers. O’Doherty thus reminds us that galleries are shops—​spaces for producing surplus value, not use value—​and such the modern gallery employs the formula of the white cube for an architectonics of transcendence in which the specificities of time and place are replaced by the eternal. In other words, the white cube establishes a crucial dichotomy between that which is to be kept outside (the social and the political) and that which is inside (the staying value of art) (2009, p. 04/​06). A key figure in the history of earthworks or land art in the 1970s is Robert Smithson whose work problematized the limits of art confined in the gallery accorded the status of commodity. His was a dialogical project of creating art outside the gallery (the site work) and the non-​site work (work inside the gallery). Four

280 Sibayan years before O’Doherty’s writings on the white cube, Smithson in 1972 wrote on the conditions of cultural confinement: when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they’ve got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells—in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries.” A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-​curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement (p. 39). Finally, with regard to the audience confined in the white cube, the public being created within and by this exhibition space, this cultural site, O’Doherty describes the kind of subjectivity produced, being ‘cultured’ so to speak in this petri dish (1986, p. 9): Presence before a work of art means that we absent ourselves in favor of the Eye and the Spectator […] by entering the white cube in return for the glimpse of ersatz eternity that the white cube affords us—​and as a token of our solidarity with the special interests of a group—​we give up our humanness and become the cardboard Spectator with the disembodied Eye. Therefore, in 1989 after having left the Center/​center, how did I deal with this crisis of faith; of no longer trusting that making art for galleries and museums was worth devoting my life to? It took seven years of general malaise, of facing the reality that making art need not be my only source of creative production. Or more important one’s source of self-​creation. It took me seven years to arrive at a point of clarity and certitude to be able to embark on doing Scapular

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Gallery Nomad (sgn), my foundational work of Institutional Critique, precisely the kind of art practice that calls into crisis the institution of art. In 1994, I  had planned a four-​month journey to Rome, Florence, Madrid, Los Angeles, and New York to visit family and friends with the trip coinciding with the start of the nomadic journey of performing the gallery. But a month into my stay in Italy, having been careless about my health, arriving in Madrid I was taken ill with my systemic lupus erythematosus, a chronic disease that struck me when I was in my teens. I was flown back to Manila straight to the hospital from the airport. My mother who was still very strong at age 84 nursed me back to health, staying with me for two weeks in the hospital and a month back at my parent’s home. Healed but still very fragile I went home with the decision to discontinue Scapular Gallery Nomad. And to finally surrender to the reality that perhaps I should stop making art altogether. The crisis had not abated. The doubts came back in full force. It took another two years of being in limbo and paralysis. The more I resisted, the more I could not move forward with my life until one day an epiphany: the act of creating art is itself an act of self-​creation. In 1997, I revived Scapular Gallery Nomad. First conceived to deal with my crisis of faith in the agency of artists, and thus in my own agency as an artist, the work was so integral to my life, it meant that to live doing Scapular Gallery Nomad again—​to embrace the work fully this time around was my way to my self-​healing just as much as it was going to be my way forward to self-​ creation; it was my way out of my dis-​ease with and within the center of art but it was also my way back to making art again no longer in despair but now fully invested, fully committed. The performance of my nomadic gallery was patterned after the wearing of the brown scapular daily by Catholic devotees to the Blessed Virgin of Mount Carmel; a religious article promising to those who wear it, salvation from the fires of hell. My wearing of a scapular now turned into an art gallery daily became my devotion to art. A devotion with the promise of self-​creation. Curating and exhibiting 34 exhibitions by other artists in scapular galleries I had sewn and worn daily for five years challenged the politics and ecology of the gallery and museum exhibition systems. The economy and intimacy of scale of Scapular Gallery Nomad meant its resources were conservative; its maintenance and integrity were limited to the scale of the everyday life of one person. Viewership was intimate; most often on a one-​to-​one basis. Its ‘infrastructure’ was the human body. The gallery was not rooted in one place. It was mobile, nomadic. Its audience was anyone I met in my daily life—​the taxi driver, the guard at the bank, sales ladies, family, friends, my students, my colleagues at the university, shoppers in malls, immigration officers at airports, everyone in art openings, and theater-​goers during intermissions.

282 Sibayan Every place where I performed the gallery was transformed into a site of art production. Scapular Gallery Nomad brought art to the here-​and-​now and away from the eternal; to the humble, messy, and the sordid and away from the clean, the unshadowed, and the sanitized; to the quotidian, the dull, the rote, the repetitive, and the habitual and away from the unique, the new, the precious and singular; to the common, the ordinary, the infra-​ordinary, and the demotic and vernacular; to the din and the noisy and away from deep silence and stillness; to life and the living and away from the entomb; to the variegated, the textured, the heterogeneous and away from the homologous and very white; to the normally unnoticed, the small and non-​spectacular and away from spectacle and the large scale; to the inconsequential and away from the significant, the valorized and momentous; to the humble and away from power and influence; to active, whole and fully present bodies and away from the fragmented audience of disembodied eyes; to the margins, borders and the periphery and away from the center; to the rhizomatic and away from the hierarchical; to the open and away from the walled-​in; to the accidental, random and aleatory, serendipitous and providential, and away from closed and controlling systems. In the everyday, all the art exhibited in the gallery (now a habit) had to be touched and noisily discussed:  Karla Sachse’s tablecloth was happily spread on a table for a curry dinner; some works crumbled as they were held (Simryn Gill’s sand sculpture made solid with egg whites); some were made to be smelled (Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Soy Sauce paintings); some heard (Filipino National Artist Lucrecia Kasilag’s recorded musical composition) and read (Anthony Tan’s 3-​page book sculpture with his poetry etched on stainless steel metal); played with (Carl Gombert’s portrait puzzles and Michael Maislinger’s Heaven or Hell game paintings); some were stolen, written on, mailed to friends (Sara Haq’s postcards); dismissed as not art (Salvador Bernal’s snap shots, portraits of the artist Lao Lianben); thrown away into a river (Yin Xiuzhen’s cement sculpture); pricked and cut me, caused a man to growl at me in the subway, and were nearly confiscated by immigration officers at the border of Mexico and the U.S. (Cecilia Avanceña’s body sculpture Sacred Heart); were instructions for the audience to dance and kiss (Martin Kaltner and Thomas Baumann’s Danze Trance and Around the World). As the vehicle of the gallery I was fully present engaging the gallery’s audience as a fully embodied subject—​talking, laughing, breaking bread with me; kissing others; photographed me and was photographed by me while dancing as the art work itself; held and smelled the art; was angry and frustrated declaring the work was nonsense; stole and wrote on the art; were themselves invited to exhibit in the gallery; a few proposing to exhibit in the gallery; was my seatmate in the plane on my way to Paris.

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In performing Scapular Gallery Nomad, I  took on the many institutional roles of running a gallery. I was its curator, dealer, archivist, press relations officer, graphic designer, editor and publisher of its catalogues, ‘architect’ and maker of the many cloth galleries. I wrote and delivered papers on the performance at conferences. All these meant I took a subject position having all possible agencies that produce belief of the value of the art work as part of the reality of the work (both my work, Scapular Gallery Nomad itself and those works I exhibited in the gallery). Scapular Gallery Nomad, a long durational daily performance lasting five years (1997 to 2002), was an altering of the script of an existing exhibition format, generally the format of the white cube. It was work that aimed to produce different publics, different subjectivities, different imaginaries, and different meanings by changing the format of exhibition and exhibition making. Scapular Gallery Nomad was a self-​instituting work. On this matter, we have Sheikh citing Cornelius Castoriadis who posits that “[s]‌ociety and institutions are as much fictional as functional. Institutions are part of symbolic networks, and as such are not fixed or stable, but constantly articulated through projection and praxis” (2007, p. 183). Sheikh adds that Castoriadis “by focusing on its imaginary character […] he obviously also suggests that other social organizations and interactions can be imagined” (2007, p. 183). [The] suppression [of present society]—​which we are aiming at because we will it and because we know that others will it as well not because such are the laws of history, the interests of the proletariat or the destiny of being—​the bringing about of a history of which in which society not only knows itself, but makes itself as explicitly self-​instituting, implies a radical destruction of the known of society, in its most unsuspected nooks and crannies, which can exist only of positing/​creating not only new institutions, but a new mode of instituting and a new relation of society and of individuals to the institution. Sheikh concludes It is thus not only a question of changing institutions but of changing how we institute; how subjectivity and imagination can be instituted in a different way. This can be done by altering the different existing formats and narratives […] that is, through deconstructive and as well as the reconstructive projects and by constructing new formats, by ­rethinking the structure and event of the exhibition altogether (2007, p. 183).

284 Sibayan Scapular Gallery Nomad was a work aiming to change how we institute in art. As a self-​institutionalizing project, it is a work of Institutional Critique. First and foremost a conceptual artist, I identify with conceptual art practices that “[critique] the uses to which artworks are put: the economic and political interests they serve” (Fraser, 2005, p. 56). Practices from which, according to artist Andrea Fraser, emerged Institutional Critique, they were “counter-​hegemonic practices of cultural and community based-​activism” (2005, p. 56). The three strategies of resistance undertaken by conceptual artists were, first, that of reforming the art institutions and commercial art apparatus that oversaw the circulation, presentation, and consumption of artworks. The second and third strategies of resistance were directed at art—​art practice and art products—​and not just institutions and the market. They include conceptual art’s dematerialization of the art object in language and action and the temporalization of artworks in specific times and spaces in what came to be called post-​studio practices (Fraser, 2005, p. 56). Note, however, that in the above strategies the following are referred to as discrete agents and agencies: the artists, art institutions and the commercial art apparatus. But earlier, the institution of art has already been described as comprising all the agents and agencies engaged in the fabrication, performance, conception, presentation, circulation, reception, and consumption of art—​all collectively engage in the institutional production of art. This field is considered by Institutional Critique practitioners and theorists as the whole institution of art. This institution is thus the object of their critique. It is thus the target of my own critique. But since we all belong to this institution, imperative to the object of our critiques is the inclusion of our work and ourselves making IC logically auto-​critical. Auto-​critical work is the work of the ‘ex-​centric,’ a postmodern subject, a term theorized by Linda Hutcheon who posits that to be off-​center is a way of “making different […] perhaps the first and necessary step to any radical change […] inside yet outside, complicitous yet critical” (1989, p. 73) of the institution to which the artist belongs. Therefore, ensuing from the very personal crisis of leaving the Cultural Center of the Philippines 29 years ago, I created a body of self-​institutionalizing work critical of the institution of art. To accomplish this critique, for the past 22 years, I have used and continue to use postmodern parody, a “form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity” (Hutcheon, 1989, p. xii). A critical distancing/​decentering form of practice, the project to parody befits the work of the off-​center/​ex-​centric. This is made possible by parody’s “capacity to reflect critically back upon itself, not merely

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upon its target” (Hanoosh, 1989, p. 113). The reflexive mode of parody therefore is a mode of self-​critique which I believe is the mode of Institutional Critique. To Fraser, a third-​generation IC practitioner, if an artist wants to change her relationship to power the best, if not the only way to accomplish such change is by intervening in the enactment of that relation […] artistic interventions can only work effectively on relations made manifest in a given situation […] And this is what makes Institutional Critique so profoundly difficult, because to intervene in relations in their enactment also always means as you yourself participate in their enactment, however self-​consciously […] We are the institution of art: the objects of our critiques, our attacks, are always also inside ourselves (2005, p. 307). What better way then, to participate in this enactment of a self-​critique than through the parodic performance of the whole institution of art to which I belong. Postmodern parody as an auto-​critical modality is, therefore, key to the performance of my critique; with performance art’s ‘strict ontological sense’ being that of its non-​reproduce-​ability clogging “the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” according to Peggy Phelan, author of Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (2005, p. 148). Here, she refers to the obvious: “Performance’s only life is in the present” (2005, p. 147). And as such, it cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance […] Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes the performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art. Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into visibility— in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control. Performance resists the balanced circulation of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends […] performance art is vulnerable to charges of

286 Sibayan valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the possibility of revaluing that emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge […] Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/​space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward […] Performance’s independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically is its greatest strength (2005, pp. 148–​149). Thus for the past 22 years, I have been performing repeatedly self-​instituting parodies. My body of work has been a series of long durational parodies of the art institution; they are performances of a series of ironic inversions of my object of critique in order to reflect critically back upon my complicity in being part of this institution and not only upon it as my target. With these works, by performing and claiming all the institutional roles in the production of art—​curator, artist, critic, art journal publisher and editor, archivist, collector, PR officer, dealer, designer and fabricator of galleries, autobiographer, art consultant, art auctioneer, biennale artistic director, and even becoming the museum itself—​I keep becoming the whole institution of art having complete control (agency) over the production of new modes of address producing different meanings and imaginaries, conceiving audiences and publics differently and self-​defining my position in relation to structures of power. Built into the project of contemporary parody is its self-​reflexivity which according to Hanoosh guarantees both a critical and a creative dimension to this form […] [where] parody not only rewrites another work, but suggests yet another one within itself, reminding the reader of the relativism of any work of art, and also of the richness of creative possibilities in an allegedly limited single source (1989, p. 117). Indeed this has proved true for me. A listing of my parodic works for the past 22 years attests to this: after five years of performing Scapular Gallery Nomad as my foundational work of Institutional Critique, it necessarily needed to be parodied eventually. The Museum of Mental Objects (MoMO) is an auto-​critique of Scapular Gallery Nomad. With this work, I became a museum of mental objects for life. Works are whispered to me. I memorize the words/​work. I exhibit the works by reciting them to an audience. No photographs or video and audio recordings are allowed when MoMO is performing. This time I have depleted the art object of its commodifiable materiality and its reproduce-​ability thereby clogging “the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” (Phelan, 2005, p. 148).

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After ten years of performing MoMO, it was time for others to become other MoMOs. Do It Yourself Museum of Mental Objects as a parody of MoMO is a critique of the franchising of museums like the Guggenheim Museum. I published online a manual on how one can become a museum of mental objects. The manual is based on my ten years of being MoMO. Using this manual, I have ‘workshopped’ three people to become new MoMOs making me now as Ur-​MoMO. DIY MoMO, multiplies the museum, de-​centering the work away from me and into other bodies, other lives. Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, a critique of the heavily capitalized art journals published at the centers of discursive production, is an e-​journal I publish and co-​founded. Ctrl+P works within a global gift economy. It is an economy that allows Ctrl+P to be unabashedly ‘a journal of contemporary art’ positioned to engage globally no matter its condition as a small-​scale, zero-​ funded not-​for-​profit backyard enterprise. It is a discursive production where capital does not control the production of art’s meanings toward the maintenance of the dominant culture and the status quo. This insistence on working within a global gift economy has enabled Ctrl+P, to use what Saskia Sassen writing for our March 2008 issue describes as “computer centered network technologies to represent and/​or enact politico-​ artistic projects” towards an engagement in a “new type of cross border work, one centered in multiple localities yet intensely connected digitally, globally” (p. 11). She points to the possibility of constructing forms of globality that are neither part of global corporate media or consumer firms, nor part of elite universalisms or ‘high culture’ […] It is the possibility of giving presence to multiple local actors/​projects/​imaginaries in ways that can constitute counter-​ globalities (p. 11). As to the future of Ctrl+P and how it can remain a vital discursive site for the not-​so-​dominant, not-​so-​well-​endowed agencies and individuals to be able to take part in the crucial project of production and circulation of meanings and ideas in this era of globalization, I cite a series of questions articulated by Yong Soon Min, one of our contributors—​questions that will guide us to go on doing our work: How can we be strategic without being doctrinaire or overarching? How do we balance a self-​reflexive awareness in the work, so that we are aware of the contingent nature of knowledge and subjectivity and don’t claim an omnipotent voice but, at the same time also embody a confidence and

288 Sibayan agency so that we embrace the possibility to affect change through our work? (2007, p. 14). Another aspect of the institution of art that needed to be parodied thus critiqued is the international blockbuster exhibition. I conceived and was lead-​ curator of xsXL: Expanding Art and 600 Images, 60 Artists, 6 Cities, 6 Curators both produced within a scale comparative to international exhibitions but executed with the minimum of resources. These projects explored the potential of digital networking specifically in co-​curating entirely through the Internet exhibitions of no mean magnitude with the latter held simultaneously in six cities around the world and mounted with the modest of resources. With the current boom of exhibitions such as international biennales, triennales and thematic traveling exhibitions held in many cities that are often in urgent need of economic revival, the project of attracting economic capital with social and cultural capital as instruments has required that economic capital itself be infused into these international expositions; rightfully so considering the massive infrastructure required to house and install these expositions and the gargantuan task and cost of insuring and transporting hundreds of artists and art works into these places and spaces and back again to the source. Inevitably, only institutions and organizations which are part of the formal apparatus of global capital have the power to produce such events/​expositions. And on the matter of geographies of globalization resulting from these transnational engagements, an imaginary of centers and peripheries, international/​global and local, are constructed locating and fixing points of emanation, reception, and circulation of ideas and meanings. In the process, a hierarchy of power reinforcing the dominance of these leading institutions is continuously being established and maintained. Sassen notes that “[g]‌lobalization and digital networking have contributed to produce a new spatiality for politics, for art, for cultural workers. In doing so, they are contributing to the production of counter-​geographies of globalization” (2008, p. 11). Working with five of my friends based in other five cities as co-​curators, I developed 600 Images/​60 Artists/​6 Curators/​6 Cities:  Bangkok/​Berlin/​ London/​Los Angeles/​Manila/​Saigon by taking advantage of the Internet as a dematerialized and democratic space allowing for 1) borderless crossings; 2) freedom from the tyranny of real space and real objects; 3) digital information to be rhizomatically transmitted, trafficked, circulated and networked to all parts of the world; and 4) great speed of access amongst a vast number of actors who “inhabit multiple localities but intensely engaged digitally” (Sassen, 2008, p. 11). Ultimately, however, it is the art biennale that is the form of blockbuster international exhibition that needs to be critiqued. In taking up this

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autobiographical auto-​critical project, I have appointed myself as the artistic director of The Other Manila Biennale (tomb), again a self-​instituting parodic work. As an ironic inversion of the biennale, it is thus again a ludic and mocking work with my co-​curators and I  referring to ourselves as “Tomb Raiders of the (Hopefully Not) Lost Art” a conflated reference to two popular cultural texts: the films Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. tomb will be held within a densely commercialized 2-​kilometer radius area with my home as its center. Artworks will be installed within these existing commercial structures. At this early stage, we are mulling over the relationship of these works existing together with other commodities. After all, art is the most rarefied of commodities. Will it be a relationship of commensalism: one species benefits without harming the host species? Mutualistic, both organisms benefit from each other? Or will it be a parasitic situation? The biennale is scheduled to open in 2022. The institution of art archive and archiving too was my object of critique. I produced the Scapular Gallery Nomad Portable Archive-​in-​Progress and The Community Archives: Archiving Artists Collectively, Openly. Both archives were open (not secure) and were intended to be created collectively putting the responsibility of authoring the archive into the hands of a community and not only on one person or one entity. Here, I put into question the canonizing function of the archive in terms of those who author it. Specific to the art archive, who has the right and the authority to name and put in order—​to locate and eventually embed in art history—​those worthy of leaving a trace in the cultural matrix so as to have had the historical reputation of being significant artists? Because according to Derrida, those who create the archive claim the power to construct what he refers to as ‘what will have been and ought to or should be in the future.’ Those who archive in their project to collect and preserve traces of human action make decisions as to who and what to archive. Whether institutions or individuals, in conserving very specific material memory and culture, ultimately whomever authors the archive has the power to confer cultural status and legitimacy. Things to Do, another archival art, is a collection of my lists of things-​to-​do-​ daily for the past 21 years. With this work, I ironically inverted as art the evidence of the invisible, the minor, the ordinary stuff of my everyday-​life that makes possible for my art to happen—​the major events, the spectacular, the extraordinary, the exhibition. Things to Do as a self-​archive makes evident the flow of the everyday—​the unseen, the unnoticed, the banal, the common, the routinary—​ versus the momentous in an artist’s life. It registers the small and the ‘minor’ in life. It is, therefore, an ironic inversion, a parody of the heroic, the spectacular, the precious and the extraordinary that is art. Re-​contextualizing these ‘objects’

290 Sibayan within the art museum, I located the everyday within the same spaces where dominant art, discourses, and ideologies exist. A parody of autobiography, The Hypertext of HerMe(s) is a critique of the institution of the literature of autobiographical writing. It is written as a hypertext with 1,000 hyperlinks. The process of cross-​referencing my art production in and to the Internet de-​centers and expands the autobiographical self as it is constructed inter-​textually and inter-​subjectively networked within the Internet. With hypertext, I interrupted, broke and violated the linearity of writing a traditional manuscript taking advantage of what hypertext provided me: a non-​ linear, multi-​ valenced, unbounded, multi-​ vocal, non-​ hierarchical de-​ centered, ex-​centric form of writing. A hyper-​textualized self-​writing befits a de-​centered art practice and a de-​centered autobiographical self. A recent work performed in Calle Wright, Performance Art Consultancy: Life, Art, Criticality is a parody of art consultancy work. An ironic inversion of a practice that specifically services clients to further establish their social status through the accumulation of cultural capital, this performance is an opportunity for me to plead my case to the artists who consult with me not to create for the white cube and, instead, make art critical of the art institution thereby refusing to feed the art market. It is important to note here finally the playful, the ludic, mocking and undermining character of all these parodic works. According to Hanoosh “[p]‌arody mocks and transforms, undermines and renews […] thus putting its critical function ultimately in the service of […] creation and continuity [ensuring that the] tradition it revises will continue beyond itself” (1989, p. 116). This is precisely what will also ensure my art practice of using postmodern parody as my mode of Institutional Critique into the far future if not for the rest of my life. At the end of this coming month, for example, I will perform Into the He(art) of the Art Market, a critique of the art auction to be held at the 2019 Art Fair Philippines. I will auction works by Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono, Ed Ruscha, Gilbert and George, Michel Foucault, Tacita Dean, and Robert Crumb. Published by the French fashion house Agnes B. and commissioned by Le point d’ironie, a publication of artists’ pages edited by the uber curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanski, these works will be auctioned not for monetary bids but for commitments such as ‘I will bid my right to breathe clean air’ or ‘I will give up smoking for life.’ In this auction, I foresee that the usual frenzy, excitement, action, flurry of bids, energy, and speed that lead up to a sale that occurs in such events will not happen. I foresee a very quiet, slow, hushed and perhaps even boring, puzzling, confusing event which is good, for it will allow for a situation where I  can open the floor for clarifications,

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discussions, even suggestions on how to proceed with the auction. That will, of course, be unknown territory for me as this is my first time to do this performance. Which again will work for my parodic intention. Disruptions will be welcome occasions since auctions are finely tuned, tightly scripted and controlled performances. I  anticipate a ludic quality to my performance due to parody being playful, self-​reflexive, mocking and auto-​critical—​all appropriate for enacting the work of Institutional Critique. I conclude by rephrasing Michelle Hanoosh’s words for my own use: in performing parodies of the whole institution of art, I position myself as an inside-​ outsider, an ex-​centric who gains agency by mocking and transforming, undermining and renewing the institution of art by putting parody’s critical function ultimately in the service of creation and continuity ensuring that the institution of art I am revising will continue beyond itself. In doing Institutional Critique in this modality, I have come full circle; from a crucial point in my life where I had disengaged from and was ready to abandon making art for good to eventually coming to a praxis of self-​instituting where I gained agency to create different publics and subjectivities, offering alternative imaginaries as a way to produce art with different modes of address to critique dominant formations and power structures. It is a way of making an artworld where I have critical agency, a world where I can be happy. In my autobiography, I concluded: as an inter-​textually and inter-​subjectively constructed subject (both as an artist and as a writing subject), by using a writing process of de-​centering and gathering, I have given myself the right to choose which discursive fragments and pieces and by which modality I  will construct my own subjectivity. For what is it to have control and the right to a self-​representation to produce my art and my self, the form of which is my own choosing? I believe it is to have a space of my own where I can examine my self as a discursively constructed and constructing subject. Critical of both the institutions of art and autobiographical writing, I engage in a discursive struggle and reformulation by choosing a form of self-​writing that is overtly self-​reflexive or auto-​critical of the cultural institutions (of praxes and discourses) through which I have emerged as an artist to locate and position my self to have an acute understanding of how the world has acted upon me and how I myself have acted and can further act upon the world toward self-​construction and self-​determinism.

Bibliography

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

292 Sibayan Foster, H. (1985). Recodings, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay Press. Fraser, A. (2005). Museum Highlights, The Writings of Andrea Fraser. Cambridge: The mit Press. Fraser, A. (2006). Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique. In: J.C. Welchman, ed., Institutional Critique and After. Centralweg:  SoCCCAs and jrp/​Ringier Kunsverlag AG, pp. 123–​136. Hanoosh, M. (1989). The Reflexive Function of Parody. Comparative Literature (Spring), pp. 113–​127. Hutcheon, L. (1989). A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (2000). A Theory of Parody. Illinois: Illinois University Press. Meyer Spacks, P. (1995). Boredom. The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. O’Doherty, B. (1986). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press. Phelan, P. (2005). Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2008). Narrating Unsettlement. Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art 11, pp. 10–​12. Sheikh, S. (2007). Constitutive Effects: The Techniques of the Curator. In: P. O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects. Amsterdam: DeAppel, pp. 174–​185. Sheikh, S. (2009). Positively White Cube Revisited. e-​flux journal 3, pp. 01/​06-​06/​06. Smithson, R. (1972). Cultural Confinement. Artforum 11 (2), p. 39. Soon Min, Y. (2007). What’s in a Cup? Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art 6, pp. 11–​14.

postface

Rhymed Reflections on Boredom Francisco Cardoso Gomes de Matos Abstract This preface consists of a series of Rhymed Reflections on the many dimensions of boredom. The author, who chose this original mode of expression to share his thoughts on a wide range of subjects—​including pace, dignity, gender or equality, to name just a few—​has created on this occasion some of these rhymes in which he explains his understanding of boredom to provoke the readers’ mind and action. He goes through boredom from a humanistic standpoint to review such a multifaceted phenomenon. According to the results of this exercise, not only is boredom psychological but social, political; it is at the same time scientific and spiritual, but overall communicative, creative, and educational. Boredom depends, to sum up, on many modern challenges that flow from economic, environmental, and globalizing processes and efforts.

Keywords activity –​boredom –​creativity –​imagination –​rhymed reflections

1

Introduction: Why Rhymed Reflections?

Dear reader, You may want to know why I use Rhymed Reflections : they help me create and share new textual directions. A reflection that rhymes? To me, it cognitively climbs. When I create a rhymed reflection, I give my thought a deeper direction. I aim at pleasant readability, and also building memorability.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004427495_016

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Through a rhymed reflection, what can my mind express? A humanizing intention that readers may humbly impress. For my mind, they are a voice. For my heart, they are a choice. On almost any kind of thought, a rhymed reflection can be wrought Rhymed reflections: why do I select? They help mirror my humble intellect. Come visit the following landscape of reflective rhyming, Imaginatively, the humble RR Mountain we’ll be climbing. 2

An Epigraph on Boredom

Boredom? Psychologically, an emotion; socially, a DIGNImotion; creatively, an imaginative promotion. Psychologically, does boredom mirror how we feel? Socially, does boredom show how life enjoyment can be real? Creatively, does boredom have an underlying appeal? Peacefully, an antidote to commotion. 3

Rhymed Reflections on Boredom and Psychology



On Boredom Prevention in Old Age

I’m almost 85 years old; my age is cognitive gold. To me, boredom is not a weary a state of mind; it is, rather, a daily challenge to all humankind. Being linguistically creative can help activate cognitive wisdom; if it becomes a sustained practice, it will help prevent boredom. My belief in anti-​boredom creativity is nurtured by a daily production of rhymed reflections; they focus on a universe of issues that will allow my mind to travel in multiple directions. When hastily saying that someone is a bore, won’t you actually be closing a humanizing door?

Postface: Rhymed Reflections on Boredom



Scoring in Life for Boring-​Prevention

If I hear people say that life is boring. I ask myself: what are they ignoring?  That many types of memories their minds must be storing. I also ask how boredom-​prevention they could be exploring. My answer? In the challenging experience of everyday living,  for the good of humankind, all of us players should be scoring.

Children’s Immunity to Boredom?

If we ask children: By boredom are you ever muzzled? By our question won’t those children will be puzzled? No matter how homeless/​toyless children are, they’re always active and playfully can go far. Why can’t boredom be a children’s emotion? Cause they’re energized by a lively motion!ç

Children’s Boredom at School?

When children are bored at school? Psychology becomes a powerful tool. Children are challenged by video games that help the future to foresee. Children carry out projects that make the classroom a fun place to be. Children groups are asked to use their creative imagination, and find solutions to local problems that call for cooperation. How can educators prevent children’s boredom at school? By preparing teachers so they never treat a child as a fool.

On a Boring Speech

When we speak of/​refer to a boring speech, what lessons could that experience teach? That nothing new was presented. Platitudes were overrepresented. Repetitious its style sounded. On shaky foundations grounded. Listeners’ attention often wandered, and coherence was also squandered.

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When you hear a boring speech, ask yourself: what boredom level did it reach?

On Understanding Boredom: a Realistic Reflection for Researchers

Our understanding of boredom should not be used to deform, but rather dignifyingly to TRANSform. Our understanding of boredom should not be probed for human intentions to minimize, but rather for human purposes to positivize. Our understanding of boredom should not be applied for human being manipulation, but rather for global citizens’ emancipatory character elevation. Our understanding of boredom not only on scientific data/​ principles should count, but laypersons’ views also humbly take into account. 4

Rhymed Reflections on Boredom and Sociology



Boredom: a Positive Role for Society?

When people are not socially at ease, is it right to speak of boredom as a social disease? What can society do,  to help humanize boredom in me and you? How can we make daily routine effectively change? For anti-​boredom customs what can we exchange? In society-​induced boredom when will there be a really positive transformation? Will people complaining about communicative boredom engage in DIGNImeditation? YES, with boredom society should know how to cope, for the collective humanization of boredom, there is hope.

Boredom: an Optimistic View

Let’s no say LIFE is boring. Why? Who knows what the future is storing? Let’s no say LIFE is boring. Why?

Postface: Rhymed Reflections on Boredom

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For our ECOunderstanding, Nature may be imploring, let’s no say LIFE is boring. Why? Who knows? New blessings will be pouring!

Overcoming Bits of Boredom

TO OVERCOME apathy, let’s promote ecodignity. Lethargy, let’s reenergize our memory. Monotony, let’s listen to a symphony. Uniformity, let’s turn on our CREactivity. Ennui, bold planetary citizens let’s be.  Tedium, let’s create a deeply humanizing medium.  

On Imprisoned Persons’ Right to Mitigate Mental Monotony

In prison, inmates’ bodies are confined, but couldn’t their mind be free? Although life in prison may be repetitive, prisoners’ mind could be imaginative. How? Outside of prison inmates could imagine being. What would their mind’s eye see? In prison, of physical liberty one may be deprived, but to mitigate boredom, what could be contrived? Speaking of prisoners’ cognitive right to mitigate boredom may sound too revolutionary, but won’t that reflect the fact that mentally, human beings will always be evolutionary? How could current penal systems that human right help to implement? To penal legislation adding anti-​boredom as a mind-​dignifying instrument.

On Boredom-​Induced Mistreatment of Animals

The shameful practice of keeping animals in cages, has been a violation of animal rights through the ages. People may speak of ‘animal rearing facilities,’ but doesn’t that actually reflect inhumanities? To ensure animals of their right to free play, will humankind ever find a global fairway? To boredom-​inducing captivity, animals are being subjected. When will animals right to EcoDignity be globally respected?

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Boredom in Professional Interaction

When BOREDOM describes a professional interaction, what could have caused such a mutual dissatisfaction? Was it due to communicative imperfection? Or to a dearth of interpersonal affection? Boredom in professional interaction; lack of lively creativACTION? 5

Rhymed Reflections on Boredom and Creativity



On Boredom: a CREATIview

When can boredom be considered a constructive emotion? When can it engage one’s mind in deeply imaginative motion? When about/​on boredom researchers write, do they turn on or off a human-​improving light? When people question boredom as a way of living, aren’t they disregarding surprising benefits boredom could be giving? On BOREdom what would be a deeply CREATIView? One in which COREdom would become a priority for YOU.

On Boredom: a CreatiVIEW

Our BOREDOM, how can we embrace? Our LIFE challenges, let’s creatively face. Instead of listing things that do not thrill us at all, let’s engage in actions that cause BOREDOM to fall. Instead of looking at lists of most boring things, let’s do something that joy to our LIFE brings. What’s the use of compiling lists of things that are boring? Instead of doing that, interesting things let’s start exploring.

Boredom: a Playful View

Boredom or dynamism? Borenism. A form of CREactivism. Boredom or action? Boraction. A form of transformACTION. Boredom or animation? Borination. A form of lively imaginACTION.

Index Aarons, Kieran 264 absolutism 11, 152–​153, 154, 159, 160, 163, 169 acceleration 65, 70, 87, 89 acedia 2, 44, 46, 78, 94, 96, 147n20, 241 Adorno, Theodor 2, 10, 81, 84, 88 adultery 7, 188, 190, 193 affectivity 73, 257, 263 aggression 85, 87, 143–​145 aggressiveness 85 Albano, Ray 276 Alfonso, Léonard 190n1 Alford, Henry 24 alienation 64, 68–​69, 77, 84–​86, 88, 139, 147, 191, 209 Allman, Ava-​Ann A. 3–​4 Álvarez González, Carlos F. 10 ambiguity 136, 168, 179, 264, 269 Anderson, Ben 258, 260–​263 Anderson, Perry 82 angst 2, 129, 130 anguish 43–​44, 46, 91, 94–​95, 110, 230 animal 140, 259n1, 268–​269, 277, 297 annoyance 2–​3, 8, 95, 204, 222 Anton, Hügli 164 Antón, María C. 14 anxiety 4, 9–​10, 49, 55, 57, 65–​66, 70, 73, 87, 143n15, 207, 211, 230 apathy 44, 46, 84, 138, 203, 297 Aquino, Corazon 275 Aristotle 34, 107 Aron, Arthur 187, 251n6 Aron, Elaine 251n6 art institution 13–​14, 273–​278, 281, 284–​286, 288–​291 astonishment 94, 223 attunement 70, 82, 93, 96, 217–​218, 218n3, 218n5, 221n10, 221n12, 119–​125, 226n17, 226–​228, 228n19, 229–​233, 238 Atwood, Margaret 13, 258, 263, 265–​266, 270 Autonomism 55–​56, 72 autonomy 51, 70 Avanceña, Cecilia 282 Bar-​Ilan, Ofek 32 Barney, Matthew 290 Baroque 64

Barthes, Roland 23 Baudelaire, Charles 48, 191n1 Baudrillard, Jean 69, 181n34 Bauman, Zygmunt 64 Baumann, Thomas 282 Beattie, Peter 136 Beck, John C. 25 Beckett, Samuel 259 Bellini, Vicenzo 101 Benjamin, Walter 25, 68, 70, 86–​89, 196, 209n4, 276 Bennett, Craig M. 38n17 Bense, Max 176 Berardi, Franco 55, 57–​62, 64–​70, 72–​74 Bergen, Merlynn R. 187 Bergler, Edmund 2–​3 Bernal, Salvador 282 Beuys, Joseph 181n34 Bizuneh, Genene 116 Blanchot, Maurice 182 Blanckenburg, Friedrich von 178 Bloch, Ernst 83, 168 Blumenberg, Hans 2, 4–​5, 189 Boethius 29n5 Bohemia, Elisabeth 155n5 Bohm, David 247 Boismont, Brierre de 96 Boltanski, Christian 290 Bolten, Jürgen 171 boredom proneness 33, 51 Boredom Studies 1, 3, 5, 8–​9, 23–​24, 26–​27, 33, 208 Börne, Ludwig 169 Bosch, Hieronymus 6 Bourdieu, Pierre 277 bourgeoisie 153, 163, 169, 178n31, 209 Braidotti, Rosi 257–​258, 258n1, 259–​260, 260n2, 261–​263 Braun, Christina von 164, 167, 175 Breitinger, Jacob 166, 166n18 Breuninger, Renate 24n2 Brodsky, Joseph 44–​46 Broussar, Nzinga H. 122 Büchner, Georg 11, 152, 158–​159, 159n11, 161, 162n14, 162–​164, 170–​176, 176n27, 178n31, 179n32, 178–​180, 180n33, 181

300 Index Büchner, Ludwig 180n33 bureaucratization 45, 189 Bürger, Peter 181n34 Burton, Robert 2, 94 Butler, Nick 3–​4, 193–​195 Cage, John 251n6 Candiloro, Hernán 99 capital accumulation 57–​59, 64, 66, 71, 74, 89, 178 capitalism 8–​9, 26, 29, 45, 55–​56, 58–​61, 63–​67, 69–​73, 81, 83–​85, 88, 145n17, 189, 211 Capriles, Elías 243–​244 Cardoso Gomes de Matos, Francisco 14 Carroll, Lewis 162 Carter, Paul 147n19 Cartwright, Lisa 37n15 Carusi, Annamaria 37n15 Caruso, Enrico 101 Castoriadis, Cornelius 283 Cavallé Cruz, Mónica 97 Chaney, Michael P. 3 Chang, Catherine Y. 3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 29n5 Chekov, Anton 209n4 Chopin, Kate 194, 197 Christoff, Kalina 35n12 chronic boredom 3, 10, 85 cinematographic narratives 10, 91 Cioran, Emil 196 classical Greece 94 comfort 191 commodification 25, 83, 86–​88 compulsion 63, 84, 87 Condon, Matthew 135 confusion 11, 80, 139, 152, 176, 179, 197, 242–​243 Conrad, Peter 3 consciousness 13, 29, 31n8, 31–​32, 67–​69, 83, 93, 96, 173, 179, 220, 225, 224n16, 234, 236–​239, 248, 254 consumption 7, 58, 62, 64–​66, 72–​73, 82, 86, 170, 173, 284–​285 contemplation 125, 241, 246, 253 contemporary societies 10, 76–​77, 86 Corbera, Enric 251n6 Craik, Jennifer 136, 136n2 Crary, Jonathan 29n5, 71, 87 creative boredom 4, 6, 12–​13, 68, 77, 79, 170, 217–​218, 228, 232–​234, 236, 249–​250, 252–​253, 262, 294–​295, 298

Critchley, Simon 203 critical theory 9, 77, 86, 88 Crumb, Robert 290 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály 188, 250 D’Andrade, Roy G. 34n10 D’Ors, Eugenio 242–​243 Dahlen, Eric R. 143n15 Dalle Pezze, Barbara 24n2, 57 Dalsgaard, Anne L. 209 Damasio, Antonio 4, 137n3 Damrad-​Frye, Robin 1 Danckert, James 3–​4, 34–​39, 38f. 1.1, 39n19 Daniels, Lia M. 3 Dannenhauer, Ulrich 154n3 Dasein 10, 82, 91–​93, 95–​100, 102–​110, 218, 218n4, 218n5, 220, 221n11, 224–​225, 239 Davenport, Thomas H. 25 Dean, Tacita 290 death 85, 96, 109–​110, 137n6, 139, 147, 162, 166–​168, 173–​175, 179, 182, 193, 197, 204–​205, 210–​211, 239–​240 deception 163, 240, 254 Deimling, Johannes 246 Deleuze, Gilles 59, 257, 261, 263–​264, 270 demon of noontide 2 depression 3, 9, 46, 49, 55, 57, 65–​66, 68–​70, 85, 120, 143n15, 209 Descartes, René 39, 94, 155, 155n4, 155n5, 160, 176n26 despair 3, 104, 147n20, 240, 242, 281 DeWolf, Mark 196 Dickens, Charles 44n24, 138n7 Diken, Bülent 210 disaffection 46, 70 disappointment 79, 85, 98, 129, 240 disciplinarity 23, 26–​28, 43 discomfort 70, 93, 103, 144, 211 disease 2–​6, 10, 91, 95, 260, 281, 296 disenchantment 144, 211, 240 disillusion 12, 239–​240 disillusionment 240–​243, 245–​246, 252–​254 disinterest 13, 273–​274, 276 disorientation 192 dissatisfaction 4, 71, 128–​129, 177, 189, 195, 260, 274, 298 distraction 25, 29, 86, 96, 98–​99, 142, 192, 262 diversion 86, 229, 259, 262

301

Index Donham, Donald L. 118 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 83, 104, 138n7 drugs 3, 7, 66, 69 Dunn, Elizabeth C. 209 Durkheim, Émile 2, 29, 29n5, 96, 196 Eastwood, John D. 1–​4, 35n12 Echarri, Jaime 105 Echeverría, Rafael 244n1 Eder, Antonia 172 Einstein, Albert 51 Eklund, Anders 39, 39n18 Eliot, George 44n24, 275 Emad, Parvis 149 emancipation 77, 89, 191, 192–​196 empiricism 40, 247 employment 10, 66, 72, 115–​119, 124, 126, 265–​266 emptiness 26, 45, 76, 78–​79, 82, 87–​89, 94–​95, 104, 141, 231–​233, 233n26, 237–​241, 243–​245, 250, 252–​253, 262–​263, 285 engagement 23, 26, 37n15, 39, 69, 140–​142, 209, 251, 287–​288 Engels, Friedrich 81, 83 Enlightenment 46, 77, 137, 203, 276 ennui 6, 23, 25, 44, 44n24, 46, 48, 170, 190, 297 entertainment 2, 6, 10, 69, 84, 87, 91, 94–​96, 171 environment 2, 4, 11, 32, 37, 47, 49, 73, 98–​99, 113, 115, 128, 135–​141, 145, 145n17, 148, 162, 187–​189, 192–​193, 226n17, 274–​275 envy 94, 170 Enzensberger, Hans M. 165 Escudero, Jesús A. 93–​94, 110 Espinoza Cáceres, Jorge A. 12, 223n14 establishment 87, 97, 109 Evans, Raymond 136 everyday life 23–​24, 26, 44–​45, 64, 83–​85, 87–​89, 141, 148, 226, 242, 281, 289, 295 Ewing, Jackie 187 existence 4, 37, 41–​43, 45, 50, 50n27, 69, 72, 78, 82, 91–​93, 96–​97, 103–​106, 108–​110, 138–​139, 166, 166n19, 174, 176, 217, 218n5, 218–​224, 226–​227, 232–​233, 233n27, 236, 238–​241, 243, 259–​260 existential boredom 71, 203 expectations 30, 77, 79, 114–​115, 117–​118, 129–​130, 173, 188, 192–​194, 197, 248, 269 experience of time 45–​47, 77–​78, 130

experimentation 4, 31, 189, 252 exploitation 58–​60, 63–​67, 82, 84, 241 family pressures 197 fascism 64, 72 fatigue 47, 63, 66, 68 Fawcett, Jonathan 30n6 female boredom 11–​12, 187–​188, 196–​198 female oppression 188 female revolution 188 Fenichel, Hanna 35n12 Fenichel, Otto 4, 35n12, 35n12, 274 Fenske, Mark James 35n12 Ferrer, Jorge N. 247–​248 Ferrier, Carole 136 Ferrucci, Piero 242 Feuerbach, Ludwig 177n28 Fichte, Johann G. 10, 79–​80 Filliou, Robert 247, 251n6 Fisher, Cynthia D. 1–​3 Fisher, Mark 56 Fisher, Max 64–​66, 69–​70 Flaubert, Gustave 188, 190–​191, 191n1, 193 flow 9, 55, 57–​59, 65, 69–​70, 138, 139n9, 144, 164, 188–​189, 211, 231, 236, 244, 250–​251, 260–​262, 289, 293 fMRI 33, 36n14, 37n16, 37n17, 36–​39, 39n18, 40n22, 40–​41, 48–​49, 50, 50n27 Fojtuch, Angelika 246 Fontane, Theodor 190, 192 Ford, Henry 9, 55–​61, 63–​64, 68, 70, 84 Fordism 59–​61, 63–​66, 68, 70, 72 Foster, Hal 276–​277 Foucault, Michel 60, 96, 156n6, 157n7, 161n13, 161–​162, 165, 179, 180, 290 Frances, Alles 3 Frankl, Viktor E. 35n12 Fraser, Andrea 284–​285 Frederiksen, Martin D. 12, 202–​203, 208–​210 free time 59, 78, 81, 83–​84, 88 Freud, Sigmund 64, 162n14 Frischen, Alexandra 35n12 Fromm, Erich 85, 87 frustration 10–​11, 69–​70, 77, 87, 113, 115, 129–​130, 187, 196–​198 Fues, Wolfram M. 7, 11, 14, 181n34 García Aguilar, Rodolfo 96 García Márquez, Gabriel 249 García Quesada, George 10

302 Index Gardiner, Michael E. 7, 9, 24n2, 56–​57 Gebrekidan Tekleselassie, Tsegay 122 German classicism 154 German Idealism 10, 76–​77, 88, 89n2 German, Danielle 2 Gewin, Virginia 38n17 Gill, Simryn 282 Gilman, Sander 40 Gimbel, Gail L. 2 Giuriato, Davide 164 globalization 287–​288 Goethe, Johann W. von 78–​79, 81n1, 88, 165, 165n16, 188, 190–​192, 192n2 Goetz, Thomas 3 Goffman, Erving 3 Goldberg, Yael K. 143n15 Goltschnigg, Dietmar 172n24 Gombert, Carl 282 Gombrich, Ernst 246 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 245 Goodall, John E. 6 Goodstein, Elizabeth S. 7, 9, 25, 27, 57, 114, 129–​130, 148n21, 203, 211 Grab, Walter 176n27 Grabbe, Christian D. 152 Grijelmo, Álex 249 Grundstimmung 10, 82, 91, 221 Guattari, Felix 264 Gundolf, Friedrich 153 Gutzkow, Karl 178n31, 180n33 Guyer, Jane 121 Habermas, Jürgen 34n10, 61 Haladyn, Julian J. 24n2, 57, 209–​210, 210n5, 245 Hanoosh, Michele 284–​286, 290–​291 Hansen, Karen T. 120 happiness 1, 64, 67, 79, 190, 192, 242, 243, 251n6, 269 Haq, Sara 282 Hardt, Michael 61 Harvey, David 87, 114 hatred 94, 193, 221 Haugeland, John 218n4 Hauschild, Jan-​Christoph 152n1, 152–​153, 159n11, 170n22, 170n22 Hawkins, Richard D. 245, 251n6 Hegel, Georg W. 10, 69, 79, 83, 166n19, 168 Heidegger, Martin 10, 12, 71, 82, 88, 91–​93, 95–​111, 135–​137, 137n4, 139n9, 140n13,

141n14, 148, 148n22, 189, 217, 218n4, 218n5, 219n6, 219n7, 221n10, 221n11, 221n12, 223n13, 223n14, 224n16, 226n17, 228n18, 228n19, 228n20, 230n22, 218–​232, 232n23, 233n25, 237–​238, 241 Heine, Heinrich 169 Heisenberg, Werner 51 Held, Klaus 92, 110 Heller, Agnes 85 Hemingway, Ernst 99 Henning, Friedrich-​Wilhelm 170n21 Hermand, Jost 153n2 Hernández Albarracín, Juan D. 10, 97, 107 Hirst, Damien 290 Hoben, Allan 116 Hobsbawm, Eric 77, 80–​82, 84 Hochschild, Arlie 196 Hölderlin, Friedrich 111, 170, 181 Honold, Alexander 181 Horkheimer, Max 2, 81, 84 hostility 142 Hughes, Kathryn 193–​194 Hugo, Richard 268 Huidobro, Vicente 240–​241, 251n6 human condition 24, 26, 33, 43–​45, 178 humanization 296 Humboldt, Alexander von 178n29 Hume, David 35 Husserl, Edmund 219, 219n7, 219n7 Huston, John 101 Hutcheon, Linda 284 Huysmans, Joris 95 Ibsen, Henrik 192 idleness 57, 71, 73, 78, 80, 142, 145n17, 167, 171n23 Igou, Eric 3–​4 Illes, Judy 32 illusion 45, 49, 51, 103, 141, 181n34, 238, 243–​245 imagination 60, 69, 109, 121, 139, 139n10, 258, 260, 278, 283, 295 inactivity 78–​79, 81, 203, 208, 210, 267–​268 independence 39, 73, 124–​125, 286 indifference 9, 55–​57, 71, 78, 107, 140, 168, 177–​178, 221, 238–​243, 245–​246 Industrial Revolution 78, 169 industrialization 44–​45, 170, 208 inertia 87–​88, 237, 244 inspiration 24, 78, 203, 206, 247–​249, 251

Index Instantaneous Creativity 13, 236, 247–​249, 249n4, 251–​253 Institutional Critique 13–​14, 273–​274, 281, 284–​286, 290–​291 Internet 13, 87, 127, 236, 251, 288, 290 introspection 10, 35n13, 35–​37, 76, 139 irritation 70 Jaeglé, Wilhelmine 178 James, William 31n8, 265, 268 Jameson, Fredric 10, 78, 86–​88 Jay, Martin 37n15 Jeffrey, Craig 120 Jeffrey, Patricia 120 Jeffrey, Roger 120 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 251n6 Jose, Nicholas 137, 137n5, 144n16 joy 92–​94, 221–​222, 298 Joyce, James 101 Judovitz, Dalia 37n15 Jung, Carl G. 247, 251n6 Jünger, Ernst 95 Kaltner, Martin 282 Kant, Immanuel 10, 35, 78–​79, 95 Kasilag, Lucrecia 282 Kellerman, Henry 4 Kierkegaard, Søren 2, 80–​81, 95, 217, 243 Kikas, Kristiine 13–​14 kill time 83, 87, 122, 124 Kim, Eun-​Suk 158, 164 Klapp, Orrin E. 68 Kluge, Friedrich 168 Knapp, Gerhard P. 153–​154 Knutsson, Hans 39 Körner, Theodor 165n15 Koselleck, Reinhart 113–​114 Kracauer, Siegfried 4, 10, 82, 88, 241–​242 Kroll, Jerome 239 Kuhn, Reinhard 2, 45n26 Kuhn, Thomas 30 La Touche, Gaston 6 labor time 58, 62, 63–​64, 84 lack of motivation 69 Lafargue, Paul 83 Laird, James D. 1 Lang, Fritz 63 Langeweile 44n24, 71, 76, 91, 106, 228n20 Larrosa, Jorge 104

303 Latkin, Carl 2 laziness 69, 73, 80, 83, 94, 208 Lazzarato, Maurizio 67 Lefebvre, Henri 10, 84–​85, 88, 145n17 Legouhy, Joëlle 191n1 leisure time 59, 78, 95, 81–​82, 192 LePera, Nicole 143n15 Leskov, Nikolái 86 Leslie, Isis i. 2 Lesmes, Daniel 96, 106 Leung, Louis 3 Levasseur, Jennifer 137n6, 138n8, 139n10, 147n18 Levesque-​Jalbert, Emile 14 Lianben, Lao 282 liberation 12, 72, 171n23, 187, 196–​198, 240, 242–​243 Linton, Ralph 195 Lipovetsky, Gilles 217n1 literature on boredom 1, 3, 36, 41, 43, 50 Loe, Erlend 12, 202–​211 Logothetis, Nikos K. 37n16 loneliness 3, 110, 242 López Aguilar, Norma G. 95 love 61–​62, 85, 94, 143, 145, 171, 174, 190–​193, 207, 221 Löwith, Karl 103, 105 Lukács, Georg 83 Lutz, Tom 208, 211 Lynch, Kathleen 136 Lythgoe, Esteban 92 Mahajan, Vijay 122 Mahop, Romuald-​Achile 106 Mains, Daniel 10, 115n2, 125n6, 209 Maislinger, Michael 282 malaise 24, 26, 44–​46, 49–​51, 70, 280 Malouf, David 11, 135–​137, 137n6, 138n7, 138n8, 139n10, 139n12, 144n16, 138–​146, 147n18, 147n19, 147–​149 Mangrum, Benjamin 29n4 Mann, Mary 197 Mann, Sandi 248 Mann, Thomas 183, 193 Marazzi, Christian 58–​59, 66 Marcos, Ferdinand 275 Marcos, Imelda 275 Marion, Jean L. 238–​239, 244 marriage 11–​12, 119, 176, 187–​188, 191–​192, 196–​197, 205

304 Index Martens, Wolfgang 171 Martin, Ariane 152n1 Martin, Marion 1, 3, 189, 257 Martin, Rux 96 Martínez, Paloma 99 Marx, Karl 9–​10, 55–​58, 68, 76–​77, 82–​85, 88, 118, 163, 178n30 Marxism 10, 55, 76–​77, 82, 84 Marxist theory 68 Maslow, Abraham 247 Másmela, Carlos 105–​106 mass culture 81–​82 mass media 82–​83, 87–​88, 196, 241 Materialism 263 Mayer, Thomas M. 159n11, 162n14 McDonough, Tom 24n2 meaningful 6, 14, 69, 87, 114, 129–​130, 176, 192, 209 meaningful narratives 69 meaningless 45–​46, 73, 93, 145, 147n20, 203, 209, 210n5 meaninglessness 12, 202–​203, 209, 246 medicalization 32n9, 45–​46 melancholy 2, 26, 44–​46, 49, 94, 217 Melville, Herman 210 memory 34n10, 101, 137, 142, 289, 297 Méndez Sanz, José Antonio 108n2 mental health 1–​3, 5, 7, 125 Merrifield, Colleen 4, 34, 37–​38, 38f. 1.1, 39, 39n19 Mersenne, Marin 155n4 metaphor 2, 27, 49, 173–​174, 179, 190, 228n19 metaphorics of boredom 45 metropolis 63, 146, 190 Meyer Spacks, Patricia 2, 13, 190n1, 193, 196, 273–​276 Middle Ages 2, 78, 94–​95, 168 Mikulas, William L. 189 Mills, Caitlin 35n12 mindfulness 202, 211 modernism 86, 275 Modernity 2, 6, 8–​10, 14, 23–​24, 26, 34n10, 45, 50, 60, 77, 88, 91, 110, 113–​114, 118, 130, 148, 152, 161–​162, 166, 169–​170, 175, 177, 179–​180, 188, 203–​204, 211, 246 monotony 25, 71, 81, 96, 141–​143, 145, 164, 297 Moravia, Alberto 4 Mosler, Peter 176, 176n27

motivation 69, 83 Müller, Friedrich von 165, 165n16 Murphy, Andrew 264, 267 Musharbash, Yasmine 114, 120, 202–​203 Musil, Robert 172n24, 209n4 Musset, Alfred de 169 Napoleon 11, 169 Napoleonic Wars 152, 175, 178 narratives of progress 121, 126 neoliberalism 59–​61, 68 Nerenberg, Albert 24, 40n21 nervousness 4, 62 Nett, Ulrike E. 3 Nettlebeck, Amanda 139n12 Neu, Jerome 189 neurology 3–​4, 14, 32n9, 33, 36, 36n14, 38n17, 40–​41, 41n22, 62, 137n3 neurotic 64 Nichols, Thomas E. 70 Nichols, William C. 39 Nicolescu, Razvan 211 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 10, 42, 81, 81n1, 148n22, 155, 157, 157n8, 210–​211 nihilism 70, 73, 202–​203, 209, 210 Nipperdey, Thomas 170 nonsense 2, 190, 282 nothingness 12, 26, 158–​159, 161, 175, 202 Novalis 180n33 novelty 128, 137, 176, 196 O’Doherty, Brian 279–​280 O’Hanlon, James F. 1 O’Neill, Bruce 202–​203, 209 O’Sullivan, Simon 261 Obrist, Hans U. 290 occupation 3, 83, 95–​96, 99, 102, 104, 107, 115n2, 116, 193 Oesterle, Günter 172 old age 294 Ono, Yoko 290 Orbuch, Terri L. 187 ordinariness 140, 195 Osborne, Peter 77 otherness 163–​164, 167, 175, 181n34, 263 overabundance of time 10, 113–​115, 129 overstimulation 67 Ozawa, Tsuyoshi 282

305

Index Padilla, Nonon 276 pain 25, 68, 152, 167, 174, 237, 240, 261, 276 Paliwoda, Daniel 210 panic 57, 65–​66, 68–​70, 73 paralysis 86, 281 Parreño Roldán, Christian R. 4, 11, 14, 188–​189, 195–​196 Pascal, Blaise 94 passion 66, 94–​96, 101, 191–​192, 242, 246 passivity 69, 98 Passmore, George 290 pastime 98–​99, 101, 103, 229–​230, 230n21, 232–​233, 234n28 pathology 3, 6–​7, 14, 61, 69, 85, 240, 274 patience 94, 241, 246 Paulos, Zelekawork 122 Paz, Octavio 112, 234 Pekrun, Reinhard 1 Peretó Rivas, Rubén 94 pervasiveness 23–​24, 27, 51, 203 pessimism 210 Pessoa, Fernando 259–​260 Phelan, Peggy 285–​286 Phenomenological Movement 10, 12, 86, 91–​92, 96, 103, 110, 217–​221, 219n7, 224 Phillips, Adam 72, 197 Piperno, Piperno 63 Plato 94 playfulness 71 pleasure 23, 64, 72, 83, 241, 243, 246 Plutchik, Robert 4 Ponticus, Evagrius 2, 94–​95 Poschmann, Henri 153–​154, 158–​159, 159n11, 162–​164, 171n23 post-​Fordism 56, 58–​68, 71–​73 posthumanities 258 post-​Idealism 10 Postone, Moishe 45n25 prevent boredom 4, 294–​295 Priest, Eldritch 210 prison 123n4, 191, 242, 266–​267, 280, 297 productive process 55–​56, 58–​59, 61, 63 productivism 83, 95 Proesch, Gilbert 290 profound boredom 82, 85, 87, 139n9, 147, 238, 254, 260, 262 Provolt, Nancy 11, 14 psychoanalysis 35n12, 85

Rabalais, Kevin 137n6 Rabinbach, Anson 29n5 Racine, Eric 32, 32n9, 40n20, 40n22 Radelet, Steven 122–​123 Raffaelli, Quentin 35n12, 43–​44, 46–​48, 50n27 Ralph, Michael 120 Rationalism 168 rationalization 87, 189 Raumer, Friedrich von 154, 158 reactions to boredom 7, 135, 190, 193–​194 reciprocity 10, 113, 122, 124, 128 reckless 3, 142 reductionism 57 Rees, Ellen 208n3 Reisberg, Liz 123 Reissman, Charlotte 187 relentless 65–​66, 70, 73, 139, 239, 268 Renaissance 94, 168 repetition 25, 60, 68–​70, 72, 76, 78–​85, 87–​88, 125, 137, 261, 265–​266, 268, 277–​278, 284 restlessness 101, 142, 177, 240, 262–​263, 268, 270 Retana, Camilo 3–​4, 188, 195 Revers, Yosef 196 Rhym, John 71 Rhymed Reflections 14, 293, 296, 298 risk 4, 87, 141, 146, 162, 165, 178, 181, 193, 221 Ritsos, Yannis 107 Romanticism 77–​78, 88, 130, 139, 175, 221, 258 Rossi, Ernest L. 4 routine 12, 68, 80, 98, 140–​141, 202–​203, 206, 296 Rule, Warren R. 4 Rumbley, Laura E. 123 Ruscha, Ed 290 Russell, Bertrand 1, 4 Sachse, Karla 282 Sadlo, Gaynor 1, 189, 258 sadness 92, 221–​222, 226–​227 Safipouriyan 187 Safranski, Rüdiger 94 Saint Augustine 2 Saint Gregory 2 Saint John Cassian 2 Saint John of the Cross 241 Saint Thomas 2, 147n20

306 Index Salzani, Carlo 24n2, 57 sameness 105, 137, 140, 145, 147n20, 178, 261–​262 Sánchez Dorantes, Ludivina 95 Sanna, Simonetta 171 Sartre, Jean P. 2, 10, 211 Sassen, Saskia 287–​288 satisfaction 83, 124, 127, 129, 143n15, 259 saturation 87, 147 Saussure, Ferdinand de 177–​179 Schellenberg, Dylan 36n14 Schielke, Samuli 120 Schiemann, Gregor 24n2 Schiller, Friedrich 154–​155, 157n9, 160, 160n12, 164, 165n15, 165–​166, 171, 174, 177, 181 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 45 Schlegel, Friedrich 165, 165n17 Schopenhauer, Arthur 10, 81, 81n1, 87, 237–​238 Schröder, Jürgen 173n25 Schulz, Wilhelm 176n27 secularization 189 self-​awareness 155–​157, 164–​166, 238, 259–​261, 267–​270 self-​care 10, 91 self-​experience 175–​178, 181 self-​realization 109, 236, 240, 259, 270 self-​reflection 28, 33, 267 Sellasie, Haile 115–​116 semiocapitalism 9, 55, 57, 59–​61, 63–​64, 66–​73 sensitivity 236, 242–​243, 246, 249 Serneels, Pieter 116–​117 Sheikh, Simon 277–​279, 283 Shweder, Richard A. 34n10 Sibayan, Judy F. 8, 13 Sickert, Walter R. 6 Simmel, Georg 2, 45, 82–​83 situation-​dependent boredom 189 Sloterdijk, Peter 4 Smilek, Daniel 35n12 Smith, James H. 121 Smithson, Robert 279–​280 socio-​cultural pressures 11, 187–​188, 190–​193, 195, 198 Solger, Karl W. 154n3, 157, 158n10, 161 solitude 12, 192, 202–​203, 206, 218, 227 Soon Min, Yong 287

Sparrow, Rebecca 136n1 stagnation 135–​136, 208 state of mind 76, 78–​79, 93, 267, 275, 294 status quo 70, 73, 87, 274, 278, 287 stereotype 193, 196 Stew, Graham 1, 189, 258 stillness 4, 12, 136, 145, 202–​203, 282 stimulation 26, 47, 65, 68, 188–​189, 249n4, 274 stimuli 82, 85, 87, 142, 188, 190, 262 stress 3, 78, 120–​121, 215, 233, 242 Strindberg, August 193 structures 7–​8, 11, 39, 101, 127, 145–​146, 148, 163, 187, 197, 250, 277–​278, 286, 288, 291 studies of boredom 29, 33, 39, 46, 51, 203, 208 suffering 7, 26, 46, 49, 66, 70, 141, 159, 162n14, 188, 238 suicide 3, 7, 147, 147n20, 179, 188, 190, 193, 196 Svendsen, Lars 2, 4, 57, 70, 77–​78, 93–​95, 189, 258–​262, 270 symptom 3–​4, 7, 10, 14, 23, 27, 42, 45–​46, 51, 64, 67, 70, 74, 76, 79, 85–​86, 88, 91, 99, 140, 189, 239 taedium vitae 46, 191 Tan, Anthony 282 Tarkovsky, Andréi 99 technology 8, 37n15, 37n16, 40, 45, 49, 59, 61–​63, 107–​109, 287 tedium 43, 46, 81, 94–​95, 191, 217, 242, 297 temperament 93 temporality 26, 42, 44n24, 44–​46, 45n25, 61–​63, 69–​71, 73, 99, 102, 105–​106, 110, 114, 140, 218n5, 232 Thiele, Leslie P. 148n22 Thompson, Edward P. 45n25 Tieck, Friedrich 81, 148n22, 154n3 Tieck, Ludwig 153–​154, 154n3, 158, 158n10 tiredness 11, 95, 152 Tissot, James 6 Todman, Mcwelling 2, 189, 195 Tolstói, Lev 188, 190, 192–​193 Toohey, Peter 2–​4, 6, 70, 188–​189, 193, 195, 203 Treue, Wilhelm 170 Tsapelas, Irene 187 Tucker, Brian 190, 193

307

Index Ugarte, David de 195 Ulimwengu, John M. 122 unconsciousness 224, 224n16 unemployment 113–​114, 115n2, 115–​118, 122–​123 unfeminine 194 unhappiness 73, 89 unstructured time 114, 120, 130 upper class 68, 81, 188, 190–​194, 197, 208, 210 urbanization 10–​11, 44–​45, 88, 115–​120, 122–​126, 128–​132, 136, 146, 242 Urrutia, Javier 102, 195 utopy 10, 58, 76–​80, 83, 86–​87, 160, 162, 194, 196 Van den Berg, Marguerite 209 Van Tilburg, Wijnand 3–​4 vandalism 143 Vant Sant, Gus 98 Vattimo, Gianni 110, 210 Velasco Caballero, Sergio 12–​13, 245n2, 247n3 Verdú, Vicente 195 Vila-​Matas, Enrique 95 Virno, Paolo 55–​58, 63, 65–​67, 71, 73 Vodanovich, Stephen 1, 3, 50n27, 189 Vogel-​Walcutt, Jennifer J. 4 Völker, Ludwig 171, 171n23

Volpi, Franco 105 Vul, Edward 37n17 Washburn, Michael 239–​240 Watson, James 35 Watt, John D. 1, 3, 50n27, 187 weariness 13, 241, 273–​274, 276 Weber, Max 2, 64, 80, 211 Weierhaseun, Romana 173n25 Weil, Simone 261 Weiss, Brad 120 well-​being 5, 12, 236 Wenzel, Siegfried 2 Whitlock, Gillian 136n2 Williams, Raymond 77 wisdom 66, 294 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 92 Wolfram 152n1 working class 61, 78, 80–​81, 83–​85, 88, 119, 196–​197 Workneh, Sindu 122 World War i 95 World War ii 11, 88, 135–​136, 140 Wu, Tim 30n6 Xiuzhen, Yin 282 Žižek, Slavoj 87 Zourabichvili, François 257, 263–​264, 270