ABSTRACT
The analysis of strange temporality and the mundane leads to an examination of boredom, which is symptomatic of being caught in a continual present that leads nowhere, yet at the same time, presents an overture into weird time. Braiding concepts, debates and genealogies—in particular around Walter Benjamin and Elizabeth Goodstein’s writing—this chapter arrives at a view of contemporary boredom as a specific kind of suspension in terms of stalled cognitive flow, but also as a stalemate between novelty and obsolescence. Boredom is seen as both cause and effect of a modern drive to novelty and the affective terrain where bids for novelty fall back into exhaustion. The reckoning here is that contemporary boredom is best seen as an affective midden of half-buried attributes where earlier forms of tedium are layered over with more recent forms. This culminates in assessments that in twenty-first century boredom itself has become outmoded. A certain mythical figure is proposed to rethink contemporary boredom: ‘the zone’ in Stalker which is not only a dumping ground for the alien detritus but also as an area of suspension which defies the organisation of the everyday and is a threshold to heterochronic.
