ABSTRACT
How does ordinary speech represent boredom? Or perhaps more precisely, how do we as members of late modern societies depict boredom as a generic and ubiquitous non-experience? What are the temporal, spatial and social coordinates of the boredom (non)experience? When approached as a cultural phenomenon the experience of boredom unfolds as a topic with a ‘lively history’ and complex literary-cultural phenomenology (Toohey 2011). Because of space limitations we may condense the temporal phenomenology of mundane boredom as a cultural and historical sensibility in the following descriptive terms. The semantics of boredom reveals aspects of modernity reflected by the closure of action and desire in a universe that has lost its meaning-bestowing contexts and promise of freedom. This is typically phrased in the ‘uneventfulness’ that some commentators have diagnosed as the vacuity of modern life in a disenchanted world: the disappearance of traditional significance, the experience of nonexperience as an existential condition that reduces the self to a zero-degree of
affectivity. Boredom’s advent emerges with the eclipse of passion, the death of affect. Modernity discloses its dark side in generating ‘experience without qualities’ refracted in the many sociological accounts of anomie, alienation, disaffection, chronic depression and related psychopathologies (cf. Goodstein 2005). This condition is prefigured in Elizabethan theatre by the paralysis of action induced by Hamlet’s awareness of the collapse of the significance of all things (‘The time is out of joint . . .’). It inspired metaphysical poets like John Donne to profound meditations on death in the midst of life. Robert Burton devoted a lifetime to compiling a sprawling metafictional Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It motivated the scepticism of David Hume and the dream of modern empiricism. The lived experiences of meaninglessness described in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and other plays would be later sublimated into aesthetic attitudes exemplified by the conspicuous ennui of European Romanticism and the historically generated social alienation denounced by critical social theorists. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler remain paradigmatic dramatisations of boredom in nineteenth-century literature. Here boredom appears as an effect of the surfeit of well-being, prefiguring the many contemporary psychopathologies of affluence. We also find psychological parallels in bi-polar experiences that oscillate between ecstatic bliss to catatonic despair or what Toohey calls ‘chronic boredom’ (Toohey 2011: chapter 2). Its particular provenance was identified in the Middle Ages as the condition of acedia, originally associated with the ascetic solipsism of the desert monks but generalised to the monastic way of life (Toohey 2011: chapter 3; cf. Kuhn 1976). In the sociology of the industrialised world boredom appears as a consequence of the increasingly mechanised, standardised and alienated structures of work, technology and urban living conditions and, by extension, the dictatorial patterning of habitual behaviour, mundane routines and cultural life. With the Fordist organisation of production life became abstract, repetitive and serially inconsequential. The darker side of this mechanisation of the spirit is the experience of forced confinement, empty time and the anxious tedium generalised throughout society by the dead hand of totalitarian political systems. Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859/2005) might be viewed as the first literary phenomenology of boredom as the universal intimation of cosmic inertia: ‘If I must die, why not now?’ Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the patron saint of boredom, is presented as a character experiencing – and suffering – a life of total indolence. As a denizen of Russia’s decaying aristocracy, Oblomov’s futile escape from commitment is to subsist in an inertial state of complete inaction, a kind of ‘death-in-life’ or ‘death-as-life’. Similar accounts of suspended life can be found in the nineteenth-century theatre of boredom: Henryk Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1890), August Strinberg’s Miss Julie (1888) and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899/1900), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov’s great plays are not only studies of love and desire, but also anatomies of inertia, disquiet and lassitude, the tedium of quotidian
life, the loss of social commitment and moral direction. The Cherry Orchard is Oblomov’s immobility translated into a four-act play. Franz Kafka would later create a whole oeuvre dedicated to an analysis of experience and social relations transformed into worthless dross. ‘God’, ‘Society’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘Sex’, ‘Family’, ‘Literature’ – ‘Life-itself ’ – are seen as empty and worthless pursuits. For Oblomov, every action is a useless passion. Experience in any genuine sense is the subject of deferral and disappearance. We might call the anti-commitment of Oblomovism, radical boredom. Radical boredom operates as a literal translation of the principle of entropy. The finite system of physical energy demands my absolute withdrawal from expenditure. Boredom as a way of life is a kind of will-to-powerlessness (what Nietzsche would denigrate as ‘passive nihilism’), the purposeless sense of merely enduring rather than living a full and creative life. Oblomov is like a child lost in the ruins of a city, poring over the fragments and detritus, but without any hope that something might be ‘made’ from the ruins. The attitude is even given a cosmic rationale: since the world is an endless stream of meaningless events and things, why supplement this dire condition? On the plane of social life: society is full of pointless activities, why augment and supplement this tragicomic condition? Oblomovism is the metaphysics of pointless indolence (the passive parallel to active hedonism). The (im)possible world of Oblomov governed by the empty imperative endure – live without effort, vital engagements, ‘knowledge’ or existential ‘irritants’ – turns out to be a pathological allegory of the Cartesian isolated Ego safely ensconced in a room (or bed) or, in its terminal extreme, a speaking body immobilised in a tub (the life of the cynic anti-philosopher Diogenes, the spiritual world of German idealism, the insidious nihilism that flows through European letters from Joseph Conrad to Emil Cioran, the world invented by Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett’s fiction of the universe reduced to a disembodied, garrulous ‘mouth’). Oblomov’s futile inertia is a kind of homologous demonstration of the immobility of all things, the fictional correlate of an anti-world of absolute immobility. Oblomovism is also a symptomatic allegory of an immobilised political history (linked to the stifling workings of the Russian state apparatus and futile utopian attempts to freeze history into some hegemonic political form). What remains of action is the solipsistic ‘remainder’ of selfabsorbed narcissism disengaged from vital sociality, dialogue or difference, a vacuous space where the Ego has nothing left but to contemplate its own inactivity and impotence. Again we should note the social and political resonances of the Oblomovian counter-world pervaded by the dead hand of bureaucracy and spiritless state officialdom. Today we speak of this dystopian vision as ‘Kafkasque’. The Kafka/Beckett limit, as we might call this deconstruction of political involvement, is to reduce lived experience to an unaddressed, incontinent stream of verbal incoherence (logorrhoea). This is where the psychopathology of boredom interfaces with the modern sociopathology of nihilism. Nietzsche, in particular, was concerned to distinguish between passive nihilism (the kind of world represented by Ilya Oblomov)
and active nihilism (for example, the value-creating passion of a Goethe or Zarathustra). Yet both attitudes are differential responses to the life-denying character of traditional values. On an epistemic plane: we are inundated with ‘knowledge’, why add more? A similar anxiety appears in Georg Simmel’s ‘tragedy of culture’ as the life-sapping disjunction between an ever-accumulating objective culture and the impotence of subjective appropriation and incorporation. This poses the radical Oblomovist with the paradox of how, being committed to lifelessness, we can continue living by nullifying life-enhancing values: how to create values through intrinsically valueless acts? Languishing in the state of radical boredom – no doubt quite a rare psychopathology – is psychologically close to chronic depression. Understood more metaphysically it appears as a manifestation of nihilism and the fascination for the ‘nil’ and ‘annihilation’ (Adams 1966). Here the ‘nothing-to-do’, ‘nothing-tosay’, ‘nothing-to-be’ elevates the initially playful form of solipsism into a lethal and ultimately, self-destructive condition. This is the kind of world-rejecting angst that youth flirts with: nothing is of value apart from the self-negating self that licenses universal devaluation. This is the domesticated variant of playful anguish, angst enjoyed as a sign of sophisticated world-weariness and manipulated to found a volatile community of fellow anguishers. Solipsism adopts the pseudo-disengagement of the bored gaze (generating the narcissistic personality along with more domestic modalities of self-love or amour propre). This is how the jaded and the mediocre fill the void with meaningless desires – play, sex, gaming, power, material possessions, entertainment, erotic adventures and so forth. But such fragile ‘solutions’ represent a temporary respite and readily collapse into self-denigration and self-loathing. Finally, radical nihilism’s devaluing of all possible acts of evaluation undermines itself as a viable way of life. In a self-negating spiral, the nihilist is forced to deprecate the very idea of selfhood as a vital source of speech and dialogue. The crisis of generalised nihilism – the flight into nothingness – elevates both propositions to the state of equally valid nonsense. We are presented with the self-reflexive paradox of solipsism and nihilism: the absolute Ego’s principled lack of passion has itself become a passion (the passionate pursuit of meaningless life). Here lies the historical continuity between nihilism and certain traditions of asceticism. Ultimately radical solipsism must also nullify the lived body and excise the corporeal condition as the pointless source of passion and desire. This is what it means to be born under the sign of Saturn. What are the temporal or space-time parameters of boredom? Along with tragic time and nihilistic atemporality we now have fatal time, the hollowing-out of significant time and intensely temporalised experiences (exemplified by the universal modern experience of non-places, queuing, delay, the ‘insolence of office’, bureaucratic red-tape, confinement, the claustrophobic sense of ‘beingtrapped’ and having no-way-out). Not action but mechanical reaction masking its alienation in cynical disguises. Not anticipatory hope but the relentless repetition of the same. In sensory terms, the lived experience of heaviness, the
remorseless predictability of corporeal inertia, the inability to move and act. In political terms, the sense of impenetrable hierarchies of power and frozen institutions that resist change and reform. In a moral idiom, the self-destructive awareness of enduring a wasted life, of being in the world as an inconsequential existent. Boredom is robotic, wide-awake insomnia, machine-like, purely reactive behaviour: the structure of repetition that is common to everyday boredom and reification (the world that ought to be suffused with significance – the human world – has been mineralised). Hence to be deemed boring – labelled as a boring person – is to be banished from vital relationships and civil society. To paraphrase Sartre, hell is the (boring) Other. In all these ways, the experience of ‘the futility of human doings’ (Culler 1997: 52) provides a metafictional icon of the possibility of absolute non-existence. From these descriptions it is apparent that experiences like boredom, melancholy, world-weariness, isolation and solitude are embedded in signifying practices and thus invite cultural, historical and semiotic analysis. It also appears that modern forms of boredom are organically connected with the practices and institutions of modernity. Hence the well-known tendency to view boredom as a kind of negative fate of the modern, industrialised, metropolitan universe – the way in which individuals forge character armour to defend themselves from the sensory overload and indifferent demands of mass societies – the civil indifference forced upon individuals living in the speed-defined realms of urban cultures. We tend to forget
how much boredom is a hidden motive of aggression and the destructive impulse (including, of course, the self-destructive impulse). Boredom – the lassitude of the soul – is the other side of inarticulate aggression and violence (consider the problems of disaffected youth as generated through chronic boredom).
