Abstract
As an experience of empty, meaningless time, boredom is not itself timeless. Unlike predecessors such as melancholy and acedia, which situate similar troublings of desire and meaning in larger natural and supernatural temporal and metaphysical frameworks, boredom depends, quite literally, on universalized, standardized clock time; its cultural horizon is a secularized understanding of history as rational progress. Both these dimensions of modern temporality come into negative relief through boredom’s nihilistic dynamic, in which the experienced emptiness of lived time comes to signify the futility of human endeavor as such. The ubiquity of (the threat of) boredom in contemporary life thus reflects and reinforces the naturalization of the modern, rationalized mode of being in time and facilitates the ever more systematic instrumentalization of desire in consumer capitalism – a dynamic through which, in the face of the absence or eclipse of compelling collective frameworks of meaning in modernity, subjective experience itself is being rendered vulnerable to commodification.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
– Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!
Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal
[M]ais le bonheur aussi ne serait-il pas une métaphore inventée un jour d’ennui? J’en ai longtemps douté, aujourd’hui je n’en doute plus.
Flaubert, Novembre.
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Notes
- 1.
For all their differences, the twentieth century’s most distinguished partisans of boredom’s intellectual pleasures, Heidegger and Sartre, Camus and Beckett, all share this elitism. Often buttressed, on one hand, by the authority of these thinkers, and on the other, by a purportedly empirical distinction between (metaphysical) ‘ennui’ and (ordinary, everyday) ‘boredom,’ this elitism has long shaped scholarship on boredom. The very title of Reinhard Kuhn’s literary/intellectual history, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, emphatically equates acedia with ennui, but the same trope makes its appearance in sociological and psychological research as well as literary and philosophical studies. As I demonstrated in Experience without Qualities, the purported distinction is not, in fact, established empirically but rather grounded by appeals to ideological – sexist, but often also classist – assumptions about which (and whose) boredom really counts.
- 2.
This dimension is figured by Emma’s relationship with the unscrupulous merchant, the eponymous Lheureux, who proffers happiness and beauty in the form of goods (and credits) she is unable to resist. Madame Bovary remains a locus classicus. For a review of critiques of the new but flourishing field of Happiness Studies as well as the broader self-help discourse that has grown out of positive psychology, see Frawley (2015). Within literary and cultural studies, see Ahmed (2010) and Berlant (2011).
- 3.
This essay draws on arguments developed in my book, Goodstein (2005). For a more elaborate discussion of the cultural history and etymology of conceptions of boredom, see Chap. 3, “Boredom and the Modernization of Subjectivity.”
- 4.
Kant, the lodestar of the German Enlightenment, was the son of a harness-maker (that is to say, of a member of the guild of Riemer) and had been educated in a strict Pietist milieu.
- 5.
Gregg (2018) offers a highly readable account of the gendered genealogy of modern management science in Chap. 1, “A Brief History of Time Management”. Unfortunately, Gregg appears to be unaware of Rabinbach’s work, which situates these temporal practices more comprehensively and critically in relation to the construction of modernity and the history of the natural sciences.
- 6.
Blasé appears in German at the end of the eighteenth century; Blasiertheit entered the language in the first half of the nineteenth century. ‘Blasiert’, In: W. Pfeifer et al. (1993) Vol.1, 145.
- 7.
Simmel’s essay on the metropolis recycles and expands on passages from the Philosophy of Money. For a fuller discussion of Simmel’s contributions, see Goodstein 2017a.
- 8.
Consider des Esseintes’ elaborate self-encapsulation in À Rebours or Flaubert’s Emma Bovary: “the nearer things were the more her thoughts turned away from them”; “she wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris” Flaubert (1965), 42–43.
- 9.
This account abstracts from the very significant matter of the historically evolving gender dynamics that inflect embodied experience in the urban crowd. Baudelaire’s A une passante, so often evoked as a celebration of the erotic and romantic possibilities provided by the transient encounters of the street, suggests how much is at stake for the blasé flanêur.
- 10.
Within experimental psychology, this universalizing and ahistorical understanding of boredom and the corresponding neglect of historical and philosophical reflection has issued in a remarkable proliferation of competing and contradictory definitions and “empirical” descriptions (See Goodstein (2017b). Such studies are often directly or indirectly tied to the institutional and social contexts (such as schools) where boredom is deployed in the service of social control. Regarding the current vogue for empirical studies of boredom and in particular on the impact of fMRI technology, see Goodstein (2019).
- 11.
Albrecht Dürer’s depiction of creative suffering, Melencolia I (1514) serves as the emblematic connection.
- 12.
That is, such suicides did not lead to confiscation of property by the state (Trenchard-Smith 2010, p. 49).
- 13.
Or even, as in the marketing of wellness and mindfulness practices and their integration in the contemporary workplace, both at once.
- 14.
For Kuhn, quotidian forms of boredom, and the boredom of those he regards as quotidian persons, are other matters – fodder for psychologists or sociologists. I criticize this (ideological) distinction and explore the strengths and weaknesses of Kuhn’s approach in detail in Goodstein (2005, ch. 1).
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Goodstein, E.S. (2021). Boredom, Temporality, and the Historical Dynamics of Abstract Negativity. In: Giacomoni, P., Valentini, N., Dellantonio, S. (eds) The Dark Side: Philosophical Reflections on the “Negative Emotions”. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55123-0_11
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