ABSTRACT
Boredom is often associated with the large-scale economic and social processes, which in the latter part of the nineteenth century radically transformed societies across Europe and North America. Thus boredom is seen as a result of the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation – perhaps as a result of the atomisation of society and the alienation of individuals from their communities and from themselves, or perhaps as a result of the rationalisation of society and the commodification of social relations. The difficulty is only that any correlation between macro-sociological factors such as these and increases in boredom are far too easy to establish. After all, in a quickly modernising society, everything changes more or less at the same time and in the same direction, and as a result everything can quite easily be correlated with everything else. In this situation, what causes boredom cannot be conclusively determined. What we need is a better grasp of the logic involved – we need an account of the causal processes through which modernisation made people bored. The suggestion made in this chapter is that the increase in boredom was caused by changes in people’s ways of paying attention. Although boredom can be defined in many different ways and given a corresponding etiology, a common way to understand the concept is as the inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to pay attention. It is when our attention flags – when nothing catches and holds our attention – that we get bored and admonitions to pay attention, and even our own conscious effort to do so, will be to no avail. Modernisation, the argument will be, resulted in a massive reorganisation of the ways in which people paid attention. In modern cities there were many things that might benefit or harm you, and unless you paid careful attention you would not be successful and perhaps not even survive. In response people had to force themselves to pay attention, or they had to be forced by schoolteachers, employers, policemen and social workers. In modern society, forcing people to pay attention is a means of disciplining them and a means of social control. Boredom was consequently the outcome of a transition to a society where attention was explicit, conscious and constantly required. Since explicit attention easily flags and easily is diverted, the result was the epidemic of boredom which contemporaries witnessed. Against the disciplinary practices exercised at the time – or, we might add,
against the disciplinary practices exercised today – refusing to pay attention is the only effective form of resistance. In modern society, only the bored are free.
