ABSTRACT
What is boredom? What is its place in the development and experience of modern culture? Is boredom a consequence of our consumer-capitalist society that drives us to perpetually seek ever-newer and more spectacular encounters, or is it a means of resisting this drive? Does being bored signal a fundamental lack of personal and cultural meaning or a moment of potential – a threshold as Walter Benjamin called it – when meaning can and must be created? Ultimately, is boredom a positive or negative experience for the individual, for society? Each of the chapters in this book attempts to address many or all of these questions in different ways and from divergent perspectives – which we have thematically organised according to five distinct yet overlapping areas of inquiry. The first (Goodstein, Sandywell, Calcagno) approaches boredom as it relates to issues of subjectivity, elucidating in broad theoretical, philosophical and historical terms the subjective formation of modern boredom. The second (Colpitt, Legge, Shinkle) examines the specifically visual register of boredom à propos contemporary art, raising a series of questions about the ‘interested’ character of modern aesthetic experience, its affective dynamics and tonalities, and how these relate to larger trends within art historical perspectives. In the third (Hand, Aho, Mosurinjohn), questions of boredom are connected to a range of techno-social phenomena, such as new media, processes of dislocation and marginalisation, and the (dis)organisation of social and virtual space. The final two sections are more diagnostic in terms of modern existence, considering the negative and positive qualities of being bored: addressing, on the one hand, the overall discontents of boredom (Majumdar, Kustermans, Dorfman, Ringmar) as the dissolution of subjective meaning and the spectre of nihilism, and, on the other hand, a perhaps more positive vision of boredom’s larger potential (Svendsen, Kingwell, Gardiner) on both personal and cultural levels, focusing on the historical and theoretical potential of this modern condition. But all of the writers in this volume share one overriding belief in common: that the study of boredom is a vital avenue of research. Over the past several decades, as the capitalist-driven society of the spectacle (Debord 1995) continues to expand into every aspect of life and globalised neoliberalism becomes the prevailing politico-economic atmosphere, we have seen
an increased need to discuss and define the parameters of what it means to be bored. Not limited to its colloquial or even illustrative usage, boredom has become increasingly recognised as a critical concept that centres on issues and problems of experiencing meaning under the conditions of modern and contemporary society. Patrice Petro (2000: 30-31) notes, ‘with the rise of visual culture, mass society, mass production, and consumerism in the late nineteenth centuries, boredom came to epitomise the modern experience of time as both empty and full, concentrated and distracted’. ‘As individual life is accorded more importance, focus on daily happenings intensifies’, Patricia Meyer Spacks (1996: 23) writes, ‘The inner life comes to be seen as consequential, therefore its inadequacies invite attention. The concept of boredom serves as an all-purpose register of inadequacy’. Petro and Spacks are among a number of scholars who in recent times have taken up boredom as a critical tool of reflection on what Elizabeth Goodstein calls a ‘modern crisis of meaning’ (Goodstein 2005: 5). These various individual texts – beginning, loosely, with the 1976 publication of Reinhard Kuhn’s The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature – have become the foundations for what we see as a larger, more focused field of inquiry that both recognises being bored as a reflective moment on the nature of subjective experience and actively mobilises boredom as a conceptual framework for sociocultural critique. One of our main reasons for editing this volume is to propose what we are terming Boredom Studies, the basic parameters of which are defined collectively through the scope and ethos of the essays in this volume. Part of establishing the cultural and critical field of Boredom Studies is, returning to the earlier question we posed, addressing: what is boredom? Not as a means of limiting the possibilities of this emerging discourse, but rather to note the generally accepted personal and social boundaries of the experience of being bored, especially in relation to other historical terms and concepts that share some of its qualities. To accomplish this we will consider a brief history of boredom, focusing on a number of key nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers who represent the earliest attempts to explore and theorise this new category of discontent, the writers, artists and philosophers who first tried to understand the precise nature of the relation between boredom and modern cultural experiences.
