ABSTRACT
Leaving the Atocha Station is an ambitious first novel by American writer Ben Lerner, published in 2011. The story largely turns on that most familiar of literary tropes, the innocent young American abroad. However, the male protagonist in this case is not entirely guileless, because a compulsive (if unmalicious) liar and concomitantly unreliable narrator, soaking in the presumptive decadence and world-weary ennui of ‘Old Europe’, represented here by Madrid. But what is most distinctive about the novel, at least from our point of view, is the recognisably phenomenological register it utilises, one that highlights many of the nuances and peculiarities of ‘boredom’ as it is experienced habitually by practically all inhabitants of the late modern world, at least in the metropoles of the Global North. Financed by an unnamed US foundation grant, the central character, an American-born poet named Adam, is charged with the task of conducting historical research into the Spanish Civil War, and, it is hoped, writing a long prose poem on same. Yet, eschewing a ‘responsible’ work ethic that earlier generations might have found more appealing, Adam seems considerably more adept at playing the role of an aimless urban flâneur: the perennially distracted habitué of bars, cafés and street parties, wandering around the Prado in the intimidating company of countless European masterworks (that generally receive fleeting attention), or attending poetry readings and other cultural events that are superficially enticing, but in the end tedious and disappointing. All such activities are conducted typically under the combined influence of nicotine, alcohol and the potent local marijuana, topped up with a smorgasbord of anti-depressants and other pharmaceuticals. Everywhere he goes, when he can overcome his own torpor and inertia, Adam tries repeatedly, and fails, to luxuriate in authentically ‘profound’ experiences, whether of an aesthetic, recreational or amorous nature. At one point, this vague and strangely insubstantial dérive seems to be ruptured decisively by the brutal irruption of History (with a capital ‘H’, as the narrator puts it): a terrorist bomb explodes at Madrid’s Atocha Station, one of Europe’s largest railway complexes, leaving hundreds of injuries and fatalities in its wake. Secretly (if shamefully) disgruntled to miss a grand opportunity to be present at such a momentous event, because sound asleep at the time in a nearby hotel, Adam rushes over to witness firsthand some of the
ensuing chaos and carnage. Afterwards, skimming through various online newspaper accounts of the atrocity, Adam strives mightily to conjure up what he takes to be raw, unfiltered outrage with respect to the perpetrators (who remain unclear), and heartfelt sympathy for the victims, but ultimately only registers comingled feelings of fatigue, helplessness and detachment, accompanied by the nagging suspicion that his memories of the event are already being sidelined or occluded by the rapidly proliferating, sensationalistic and often wildly contradictory media reports. Chastened by this perceived failure to experience and grasp fully the immediacy of such an important geopolitical incident, or to feel intensely about something – anything – Adam becomes more and more idle and reclusive. Instead of attending dutifully to his own writing project, he becomes a virtual shut-in, chain-smoking and reading obsessively the novels of Tolstoy, amidst an interminably dull, rainy Spanish winter that melds successive days into a continuous grey blur. Evoking a cinematographic frame of reference (itself indicative of our imagination’s paucity in the face of an omnipresent culture industry), Adam describes his present life of isolation and compulsive introspection as resembling a ‘slow dissolve between scenes’, an emotionally featureless sort of peripherality which ‘possess[es] no intrinsic content’. Dwelling in the fuzzy interstitial zone ‘between’ events or happenings of palpable significance also means that time itself appears immanently self-contained, as static or ‘dilated’, stretching into what Søren Kierkegaard called the ‘bad infinite’. Mired in the throes of such a ‘vacant’ temporality, a ‘duration without duration’, moments of real passion or interest are furtively hinted at, but seem forever deferred. Adam eventually comes to wonder whether we can really confront and grapple with the genuinely ‘new’, because all of life seems to be presented to us in a pre-emptively codified and structured fashion. In a world that is ‘always-already’ exhaustively interpreted, without remainder or surplus, everything of importance has already been said or done, and life becomes an endless series of staged, rote performances. (Adam’s feeling of stultification here might help to explain his penchant for telling grandiose lies, contrived to make his background seem much more unusual and tragic than it really is.) Or else, as we will explore more fully later, we strive to cast off social constraints in a bid to ‘just do it’, but this ostensible rebelliousness ultimately masks a deeper submissiveness. In his epic novel of late modern boredom The Pale King, David Foster Wallace (2011: 141) calls this the ‘tyranny of conformist nonconformity’, and it functions to shore up our status as ‘good’ neoliberal subjects. The net result is that our ability to give meaning to and actively shape, on a continuous basis, our individual and collective lives is effectively nullified. Part of the problem here is our old nemesis, the ‘prison-house’ of language: Adam intuits that our words (which, as Mikhail Bakhtin once noted, are pretty much all borrowed from others) seem fundamentally unable to give voice to our desire for uniquely real experience, forever and unavoidably insulating us from the latter. He concludes this downbeat reverie by suggesting that the nameless, formless affective state called boredom simply is
the basic stuff of experience as such, our generic way of being, and that it exists this way ‘for all people for all time’ (Lerner 2011: 64, 65). Readers might be somewhat mollified to learn that, relatively speaking, things do not end all that badly for Adam. He even has a romantic dalliance before he departs for his homeland that is slightly more emotionally weighty and satisfying than usual, giving him a taste of the possibility of actual happiness, albeit fleetingly so. And Adam resolves, with some degree of genuine conviction, if after considerable prevarication, to write a novel about his sojourn in Spain. (Given the Escherian bent of high literary modernism, we might not be entirely surprised to discover that this is roughly what happened to the ‘real’ Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station being the result.) Yet, there is no Bildung here, no genuine growth or development: Adam seems mired in an eternal present, condemned to tiresomely repeat the same actions and mistakes, the same banal observations, over and over. As such, despite the comparatively optimistic ending, at least given the prevailing tone and subject matter, the novel leaves us with a lingering sense that the common substratum of our shared being is one that, to a significant extent, consists of a seemingly infinite string of undifferentiated and fundamentally insignificant moments bereft of transcendental possibilities, a debilitating tedium that Walter Benjamin characterised as ‘empty, homogeneous time’ – in a word, boredom. Lerner’s novel, quite apart from its intrinsic aesthetic merits, is valuable for us because it helps us diagnose, in acute and finely-wrought terms, the central features of this condition. With the caveat that ‘Adam’ is, of course, a literary artefact, what do his (or ‘his’) teeming and often inchoate inner musings tell us about the lived experience of boredom, as conveyed here by Lerner’s authorial gloss? For one thing, the perpetually bored mien of the novel’s hero – assuming ‘hero’ is the right word here, insofar as we live in an age of mundanity or ‘everydayness’, rather than the mythopoetic ‘adventure time’ characterising the epic narrative (see Featherstone 1992) – seems to stem from an underlying sense of futility, insignificance and disconnection from the world. Adam desperately wants to take part in the flow of historical time as an active subject rather than a passive object; to see human existence, both on a personal level, and in a social sense, as a selfreflexively willed project through which we construct meaning and purpose. The philosopher Agnes Heller (1989) identifies this as the central feature of the human condition under the aegis of modernity: since our respective goals, practices and interpretive frameworks have become so irreducibly pluralistic, all we really share today is the core existential task of confronting the radical contingency into which we are all thrown. For Heller, we are compelled to transform this cosmic randomness into a semblance of willed destiny, as opposed to the pre-ordained ‘fate’ that marked life in the pre-modern world. Yet, as much as Adam is attracted to this fundamentally Romantic conceit, he understands we are more accurately at the whim of a bewildering spectrum of abstract and anonymous global forces. Deadly pandemics, the slow-motion catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change, steadily worsening economic conditions, the
mindless violence committed by both state and extra-statist agencies – these are things we can barely comprehend, never mind able to shape pragmatically in any consequential way. As Thomas Dumm reminds us in A Politics of the Ordinary, if history with a capital ‘H’ appears to unfold in a manner utterly indifferent to the vicissitudes of our daily lives, it is not surprising that many of us return the favour. That is, we respond to the world of events and happenings and personages that our politico-financial elites tell us is vitally important, and worthy of our respectful and sustained attention, with an offhand, insouciant shrug, as essentially boring, when it even registers in our consciousness at all. Boredom, as the Romanian writer Emil M. Cioran (1970: 182) once explained, is ‘our normal state, humanity’s official mode of feeling, once it has been ejected from history’. But, according to Dumm, there is also a curious reversal here. Not only does much everyday boredom arguably stem from our systemic marginalisation vis-à-vis loci of power, resulting in our significantly diminished ability to simply be and do, it could also signal our resentment at being (more or less) forcibly utilised for ends that we might well scarcely approve of, assuming we were ever asked. In particular, this concerns our de facto reduction to a ‘human resource’ in the unending and thankless service of capital accumulation, without a compensatory degree of control over the overarching process, much less any recognition of our inherent value qua human beings. In this instance, boredom might be construed as a ‘symptomatic response to an unsought inclusion[,] an expression of discomfort at not wanting to be a part of a larger narrative while being acutely aware that one is’ (Dumm 1999: 14; see also Majumdar, in this volume). Such niggling unease is registered in what Cioran calls the ‘larval anxiety’ that always infects pervasive boredom, whereby the reassuringly familiar ordinariness of daily life is overwhelmed by the pressure of wider events and developments that unsettle, vex and mystify, or even pose a clear and present existential threat. As the old joke goes, you might not be interested in history, but history is very much interested in you, whether you like it or not. In more phenomenological terms, Adam cannot shake the feeling that modern life is generally lived as a series of ellipses, conforming to an ‘in-between’ state of slackness, enervation and flaccidity. This is reflected in the disorienting sensation that the ego itself, usually understood as an entity with clear boundaries, propensities and a robust capacity for self-directed agency, appears when we are bored to dissolve into the world itself, and that, conversely, the external world’s ‘objective’ banality seeps into our every pore, lodging there and calcifying, weighing us down. As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (1993: 72) notes, in boredom both the world and ourselves seem equally impoverished. This is particularly the case, as indicated above, because the flow of time from the perspective of the bored subject lacks clarity or definition, or ‘sharply localized occurrences’ (as per Lerner’s narration), wherein figure and ground, before and after, constantly bleed into each other. Hence, the miasmatic, ‘foggy’, indistinct nature of profound boredom, its status as free-floating sensation generally irreducible to any specific complaint, thing or situation. And, although Adam’s particular state of boredom waxes and wanes
over the course of the novel, insofar as it can be held in temporary if partial suspension through various distractions – narcotics, a passing erotic fixation, staring at one of those Prado masterpieces – it cannot be definitively cathected or discharged. Boredom is a mood or affect that we are ‘seized’ or ‘inhabited’ by, washing over us more or less involuntarily, as the existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1995) would say, and, being notably resistant to being driven away merely by dint of will, is something we are compelled to confront eventually. For Sianne Ngai, whereas more forceful and easily read emotional states like anger or shame seem able to precipitate socially-sanctioned forms of intense catharsis and moral resolution, an idea traceable to Aristotle’s writings on tragic drama, boredom (like anxiety and paranoia) is a minor or ‘weak’ affectivity that lacks such a clearly delineated quality or specific object-orientation, and fails to manifest the ethical force or energising potential of stronger and more identifiable emotions. As a resolutely non-cathartic ‘ugly feeling’, boredom is a more muted, sub rosa mood, marked by what Ngai describes as ‘flatness and ongoingness’. It seems to be always-already present in some form, hovering just out of sight, on the edges of our affective ‘peripheral vision’. We might bear direct witness to decisive events, as Adam (nearly) does at the Atocha Station, but what is lacking is any real expectation they will form an integral part of some overarching grand narrative, as opposed to the accretion of seemingly random memory fragments and imagistic percepts that fail to add up completely to some larger pattern or meaningful totality. This is part and parcel of modernity’s endless ferment and agitation, a ‘Brownian motion’ characterised by the endlessly looping commodity time of late capitalism, which is ostensibly all sound and fury, but never seems to go anywhere in particular. Boredom cannot be the bearer of some transcendental sublimity, but only what Ngai calls the ‘stuplime’, which is the purview of the comic, the vulgar, and the finite. As such, boredom ultimately fails to allow for ‘satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor [leads to] any therapeutic or purifying release’ (Ngai 2005: 7, 6; also Majumdar 2013: 4). One of the curious aspects of boredom’s phenomenology is that it is experienced as a radically atomising power, inculcating a highly personalised form of psychic malaise typically ‘naturalised’ by the subject as timeless existential fate. Adam observes, for instance, that his bored loneliness has a ‘particular texture’ intrinsic to his own (admittedly solipsistic) world, and that its ineffability cannot be conveyed effectively to others. Of course, we know others get bored too, but only ours allows for such an exquisitely private form of invisible suffering and quiet desperation. In her monumental work Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elisabeth S. Goodstein (2005: 5) identifies the paradox that, however much boredom appears to be a wholly idiosyncratic and incommunicable form of subjective distress, it is every bit as much an ‘empirically conditioned social phenomenon’. Adam might be confounded on this point, but there is no royal road to pristine, unmediated experience except through its discursive and cultural framing, which is linked constitutively to an overarching process of modernisation. The experiential realm, in short, is always mediated,
which is why a phenomenological analysis must be supplemented by a consideration of wider cultural and sociohistorical forces. Interestingly, although Adam says that one’s boredom exists ‘for all time’, and hence seemingly traceable to an underlying (if obscure) metaphysical flaw in Being itself, at other instances he seems to realise that boredom – or at least our boredom2 – is more accurately understood as a product of the twenty-first century. This is especially true of the late modern version of neoliberal capitalism wherein, first, everything is commodified, monetised and colonised aggressively by the ‘attention economy’; and, second, demands insistently that we cultivate a feverish ‘entrepreneurialism of the self ’. The latter can be described as the Sisyphean task of ceaseless adaptability in the face of socioeconomic and ontological precarity, stoking hyperbolic expressivity so as to sustain and continually accelerate circuits of money, information and power, what Ben Agger (2011: 125) calls a ‘manic connectivity’ at the behest of a ‘fast’ or ‘frictionless’ capitalism, culminating in limitless self-aggrandisement at all costs. This condition is, at heart, monumentally boring. Neoliberal boredom is therefore not a waiting for something, in some quasisubversive capacity (which is a common enough position in the literature), but rather, as Eldritch Priest (2013: 36) puts it, ‘a form of “acting out” the ambivalence inhering in contemporary neoliberal culture’s promise of endless selfinvention’. This modality of boredom is arguably a response to late capitalism’s relentless imperative to always be ‘on’, to continually self-valorise, an injunction which is impossible to ignore entirely, but that always teeters on the brink of abject failure, concerning, in particular, our growing inability to suture together past memories and experiences, present existence and anticipations of future events to create a viable, cohesive sense of personhood, within the context of our intersubjective relations. This crucially involves our capacity to exercise the synthetic powers of the imagination vis-à-vis a sense of lived temporality (see Johnsen 2011: 485), in a world marked increasingly by the extensive and intensive usurpation of the self ’s affective propensities, communicative capacities and libidinal energies. In Benjamin’s (1973: 117) classic formulation, Atocha’s Adam lacks the ability to draw together the disconnected impressions and fleeting sensations (Erlebnis) of everyday life into a meaningful whole (Erfahrung), thereby constituting a coherent life narrative over the course of what Benjamin terms ‘long experience’. As such, what seems to be happening in the present conjuncture is that formerly oppositional cultural strategies and partially resistant subjectivities have been largely subsumed by the dynamics of capitalism’s relentless and untrammeled self-expansion (see Berardi 2007; Gardiner 2014). To put the matter in somewhat different terms, Adam seems self-aware enough to know that his own boredom is as much a product of what we might call his ‘subject-position’ – that is, his status as a relatively affluent, white, male denizen of the Global North, living a ‘damaged life of pornography and privilege’, as opposed to some eternal affliction of the ‘soul’, whatever that is. Adam knows he can always scuttle back to the waiting bosom of his well-to-do family
stateside, probably in a gated community with a BMW in the garage, when he tires of his half-hearted picaresque adventures, or runs out of money, whichever comes first. And it’s not surprising that he seeks to distract himself from contemplating the full measure of such a potentially nihilistic condition, usually pursuing the easier path of finding endless new ways to be titillated and entertained, utilising the very trappings of our hyper-technologised age that, ironically, are largely responsible for generating our boredom in the first place. For Mark Fisher (2009), this quixotic enterprise leads to a pronounced state of ‘hedonic lassitude’, the inability to seek anything but an immediacy of pleasure, in a context of generalised anomie and what Benjamin calls the ‘atrophy of experience’. By this reading, late modern boredom is an unavoidable side-effect that happens when our umbilical connection to the ‘soft narcosis’ of digital entertainment, drugs (licit and illicit), or untrammelled access to information ‘on demand’ is in any way threatened, a situation that Adam is all too familiar with. ‘THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S BOREDOM’, as Lerner (rather empathically) states in his 2006 poetry collection Angle of Yaw. If boredom in the classic ‘Fordist’ era mainly concerns physical exhaustion and mental under-stimulation, especially in repetitive and alienated factory labour, the boredom more typical of twenty-firstcentury life reflects a condition of information overload and the constantly accelerating hyper-stimulation of desire vis-à-vis work and consumption. We are able to ‘kill’ deadening time through such hyperactivity, but there is also the widespread sense that, considered retroactively, binge-watching some reality television show (to give one example) is a colossal waste of time, indicating the futility of pursuing unhindered self-gratification in a fully commodified world to the exclusion of most everything else. Hence the commonplace expression, ‘I’ll never get that hour/afternoon/day back’. Insofar as mass leisure more typically underscores rather than alleviates pervasive boredom, or at best only temporarily deflects it, the investment of desire in late modernity, of where and how to properly direct our attention, becomes significantly problematised. That is, if the ‘indifference to difference’ that boredom manifests is connected to our incapacity to focus attention, to linger intently over an object, person or event and derive genuine meaningfulness from this engagement, this is traceable to a fracturing of time and consciousness that is prevalent in the late modern age. More specifically, it relates to our increasingly common status of being ‘here’ and yet ‘not here’, wherein our perceptual and attitudinal apparatus is grounded simultaneously in concrete, embodied space-time, but also in a plethora of phantasmagorical, virtualised realms that are effectively derealised, especially through technosocial means (see Morse 1998). In this perennially distracted condition, actions and thoughts are performed semi-automatically, on a groundless ground that lends itself to a permanently bored visage. This is so even if the repetitive and ritualised nature of such time-killing does, at least to some extent, impart a degree of autonomy to the subject, in the guise of ‘time that is our own, even if devoted to banality’ (Svendsen 2005: 23; see also Mosurinjohn, in this volume). Yet, as Adorno noted in his remarkable short essay ‘Free Time’, the pursuit of
modern leisure in its many-splendored forms is ultimately an external compulsion leading to ‘objective desperation’, and hence an extension of work, rather than a viable escape from it. Adorno contrasts this with a utopian image of genuinely autonomous ‘play’, which employs all aspects of the human capacity for an unfettered imagination, and that is not (yet) wholly commodified. This is why we cannot invest boredom with timeless metaphysical significance: ‘Boredom’, writes Adorno (1991: 166), ‘is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labour’ (see also Kingwell, in this volume). It is worth noting at this juncture that, although it has been disputed, the etymology of the word ‘boredom’ itself seems to be linked to the action of drilling or boring a hole – to wit, a highly repetitive, laborious form of work that requires a grinding through, or wearing out, of some obdurate substance (see Dumm 1999: 13; Priest 2013: 37). It is doubly interesting to meditate on the fact that, if our subjective boredom is to some extent premised on a world of ‘objective’ banality, the origins of the word ‘banal’ itself apparently lie in the Serbo-Croat tongue, meaning, in essence, the compulsory service owed by the common peasantry to their lords and masters, and hence as something both numbingly routine and overtly coercive and hierarchical (Majumdar 2013: 17-18). In a world where, increasingly, we can no longer distinguish work from any other human activity in the overarching ‘social factory’ in which we now find ourselves, and most such activities are unimaginably pointless, stultifying, and in any case technologically redundant, what anthropologist David Graeber (2013) refers to as ‘bullshit jobs’, it is no surprise that even our allegedly ‘spare’ time stretches out to an undifferentiated, horizonless plane of monotony. Boredom can here be understood as a coping mechanism by which employees, especially in the service or data industries, inure themselves to soul-destroying and dead-end jobs. These occupations are not organised in terms of any rational measure of ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ with an eye to meeting genuine human needs, but to maximise the surveillance, control and exploitation of all manner of workers, reaping political and financial rewards for the one per cent alone. Boredom in the late modern workplace could therefore be said to enable us to ‘just get on’ with the tasks at hand, however bereft of meaning these might ultimately be. Faced with the inability to engage in fulfilling activities, boredom seems to be a way to defer a confrontation with an underlying sense of pervasive meaninglessness (see Johnsen 2011: 488), and, hence, a psychic strategy of pursuing the ‘lesser evil’ of avoiding anxiety rather than embracing a seemingly unobtainable realm of genuine pleasure. By this account, boredom is, in the words of cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (2008: 465), ‘something like a defense mechanism, a repression, a neurotic denial, a preventive shutting off of affect, which itself finally reconfirms the vital threat of its object’. In another sense, however, being bored is a kind of refusal to acquiesce wholly to what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2007: 91) regards as the ‘totalitarian’ injunction to invest all our dreams, desires and energies in such dehumanising
forms of work and banalised mass leisure, and, as if to add insult to injury, to be relentlessly happy in our subjection. To bring Lerner’s novel back into consideration, if boredom expresses, if usually covertly or unintelligibly, a ‘desire for desire’, Adam seems to acquire precisely this, and rediscover a semblance of drive and purpose in his life, but only at the very nadir of his ennui. Boredom appears to be a passive state on the surface, but its veneer of torpidity and vacuousness hides an underlying restless energy that is searching for something: an outlet, a plan, an activity, a focal point, although of course this can take highly destructive as well as creative or affirmative forms (see Nisbet 1982; Kustermans, in this volume).3 Understood in this way, even if only dimly grasped as such, boredom always manifests a critical element, because it represents a fundamental dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, and our place in it. Hence, it can be seen as a ‘powerful hermeneutic instrument’ (Jameson 2008: 418) that effectively defamiliarises the generally unquestioned, taken-for-granted nature of everyday life. Boredom tells the truth. It is not a deception. And it ‘knows a lot’, as Marianne Boruch (2013: 117) puts it, perhaps too much for us to bear at times, because there is no ‘cure’ for it. Boredom is, in effect, the unavoidable price we pay for living in a disenchanted and hyper-rationalised world, wherein desire and the world, expectation and actuality, appear to be forever at odds.4 We sense that, despite Adam’s more optimistic situation at the end of the story, he is not suddenly forever, or even temporarily, beyond boredom; it lies in wait, biding its time, an ever-present shadow falling across late modern existence. As such, we are compelled to work with and through it. ‘One will never totally avert boredom’, Dumm (1999: 16) asserts, ‘but one may be able to dissipate its effects by easing the anxiety it represents, converting the tension of boredom into the quiet of meditation so as to prepare oneself to begin again’. By our estimation, Dumm is correct to argue that, although boredom latently harbours certain possibilities, it cannot be entirely superseded; nor is it ‘redemptive’ in any quasitheological sense, not least because we can never escape the gravitational orbit of the everyday’s radical immanence. But neither, for that matter, is there a neat dialectical reversal locatable on the ‘other side’ of boredom, through which lack or negation suddenly flips over into superabundant plenitude. Boredom isn’t simply a way station between intensities, suggests Priest (2013: 75), because it is ‘both objective and subjective, dull and interesting – ambivalent’. As such, it behoves us to play close attention to how boredom is manifested at the level of what Michel de Certeau (1984) called the ‘tactics’ of everyday practice, especially in relation to newly-emerging digital technologies and media platforms, because here we may find hidden resources for agency and resistance that might blunt, at least to some extent, the moralistic critique of boredom that is prevalent in the extant literature (see Hand, in this volume). Boredom is a deeply ambivalent and paradoxical affective condition not least because intertwined closely with equally complex and contradictory sociohistorical forces; namely, the very process of modernisation itself. Much of this has to do with post-Newtonian conceptions of time that have become pre-eminent
during the last two hundred years or so. As Reinhart Koselleck (2004) has argued, modern time is ‘empty’ and ‘homogeneous’ à la Benjamin because it posits futurity as simultaneously open-ended and proximate, but also an essentially unknowable phenomenon. That is, the fullness of meaning is always deferred to an abstract future state, which can only be accomplished provisionally through a relentless form of instrumental striving that is inherently vexatious and burdensome for the subject. This results in an ‘emptying out’ of temporality in regard to the here-and-now, wherein immediacy can only be presently experienced as lack or absence. Modern selfhood in relation to a progressive, linear conception of time appears, consequently, as something of an empty vessel that can never be filled, no matter how hard we try (see Goodstein 2005: 123). Georg Simmel (1997) would supplement this observation about temporality with an emphasis on the abstract equivalence fostered by money as the inescapable medium of exchange in modernity, draining the world of qualitative differences and inculcating a ‘blasé’ attitude of cold, calculating nonchalance, or boredom. Alongside such insights, we might suggest additionally that, as mentioned above, while persistent boredom does at times seem to alert us to certain dormant potentials, and is therefore describable as ‘pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, [and] unrealized possibilities’ (Lefebvre 1995: 124; also Bachelard 1994: 16-17), these can never be activated fully without a thorough-going revitalisation of our communal life. In his 1945 study of Nietzsche, Georges Bataille once suggested that Being always seeks something beyond itself, strives restlessly to forge vital connections with others and the world at large. When this impulse is stymied, for whatever reason, the egocentric collapse into ourselves inculcates an anxious boredom that ‘discloses the nothingness of self-enclosure’ (Bataille 1992: 23). Purely individual adaptations, self-help techniques and sincere (if largely ineffectual) resistances with respect to boredom are destined to fail, because they do not go beyond the confines of our privatised and commodified life experience. They are by turns palliative, accommodating or frustrated, evincing only a partial and largely mystified understanding of how capitalism induces the fragmentation, homogenisation and quantification, or objective banalisation, of space-time (see Augé 1995; Crary 2013). Some, such as Maurice Blanchot (1987), have suggested that the everyday generally, and specifically boredom, is an experiential realm that resists systematisation, forever eluding our conceptual grasp; as such, boredom constitutes, not a moment in an overarching process of dialectical transcendence, but rather an essentially unknowable aporia. Although it might seem to be an entirely ineffable, subjective and hence incommunicable experience, however, we have taken pains to argue here that boredom is symptomatic of much deeper social currents that can be uncovered and grasped both theoretically and pragmatically. In this, we would agree with Cornel West’s (2008) pithy formulation that ‘Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement’. What this further implies is that there can only be collective solutions, insofar as they exist, to the libidinal disinvestment and psychic dissatisfaction that boredom in the late modern era might be said to
represent. This is simultaneously a political, cultural and ‘therapeutic’ project, itself hinging on the growing awareness of what Berardi (2011: 151) characterises as the ‘commonality of knowledge, [the] ideological crisis of private ownership, [and] communalization of need’. One thing is certain, at any rate: we have met the bored, and they are us.
