Boredom Studies Reader Frameworks

and Perspectives Michael E Gardiner

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/boredom-studies-reader-frameworks-and-perspective
s-michael-e-gardiner/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The American Challenge Reader Michael Phillips

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-american-challenge-reader-
michael-phillips/

The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader 1st

Edition Emily Hipchen

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-routledge-critical-adoption-
studies-reader-1st-edition-emily-hipchen/

The New Humanities Reader, Sixth Edition Richard E.

Miller And Kurt Spellmeyer

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-new-humanities-reader-sixth-
edition-richard-e-miller-and-kurt-spellmeyer/

Sustainable Energy Mix in Fragile Environments

Frameworks and Perspectives 1st Edition Mary-Ellen
Tyler (Eds.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/sustainable-energy-mix-in-
fragile-environments-frameworks-and-perspectives-1st-edition-
mary-ellen-tyler-eds/
Approaches to Peace: A Reader in Peace Studies David
Philip Barash

https://textbookfull.com/product/approaches-to-peace-a-reader-in-
peace-studies-david-philip-barash/

The Political Economy of Local Regulation: Theoretical

Frameworks and International Case Studies 1st Edition
Alberto Asquer

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-political-economy-of-local-
regulation-theoretical-frameworks-and-international-case-
studies-1st-edition-alberto-asquer/

Surveillance Privacy And Security Citizens Perspectives

Michael Friedewald

https://textbookfull.com/product/surveillance-privacy-and-
security-citizens-perspectives-michael-friedewald/

Geomorphology and Society 1st Edition Michael E.

Meadows

https://textbookfull.com/product/geomorphology-and-society-1st-
edition-michael-e-meadows/

Categorical and Nonparametric Data Analysis E. Michael

Nussbaum

https://textbookfull.com/product/categorical-and-nonparametric-
data-analysis-e-michael-nussbaum/
Boredom Studies Reader

Boredom Studies is an increasingly rich and vital area of contemporary research that examines
the experience of boredom as an important – even quintessential – condition of modern life.
This anthology of newly commissioned essays focuses on the historical and theoretical
potential of this modern condition, connecting boredom studies with parallel discourses such
as affect theory and highlighting possible avenues of future research. Spanning sociology,
history, art, philosophy and cultural studies, the book considers boredom as a mass response to
the atrophy of experience characteristic of a highly mechanised and urbanised social life.

Michael E. Gardiner is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western

Ontario, Canada, where he is also a core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of
Theory and Criticism. He teaches on social theory, everyday life and the sociology of utopia.

Julian Jason Haladyn is an art historian and professor at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada.
He is the author of Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom (Zero Books, 2014) and
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (Afterall, 2010), as well as numerous journal articles and book
chapters on art and critical theory.
Boredom Studies Reader
Frameworks and perspectives

Edited by Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 selection and editorial matter, Michael E. Gardiner and Julian Jason Haladyn; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-92746-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-68258-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
PART I Introduction

1 Monotonous splendour: an introduction to boredom studies

PART II Boredom and subjectivity

2 Between affect and history: the rhetoric of modern boredom

3 The dialectic of lassitude: a reflexive investigation
4 The life that is not purely one’s own: Michel Henry and boredom as
an affect

PART III Boredom and visual culture

5 Entertainment: contemporary art’s cure for boredom

6 Boring cool people: some cases of British boredom
7 The universal foreground: ordinary landscapes and boring
photographs

PART IV Boredom in/and the [techno-]social world

8 #Boredom: technology, acceleration, and connected presence in the

social media age
9 Kierkegaard on boredom and self- loss in the age of online dating
10 Overload, boredom and the aesthetics of texting
PART V Boredom and its discontents

11 Boredom and the banality of power

12 Boredom and violence
13 Everyday life between boredom and fatigue
14 Attention and the cause of modern boredom

PART VI Boredom’s futures

15 Boredom and the meaning of life

16 Boredom and the origin of philosophy
17 Postscript: not your father’s boredom: ennui in the age of ‘generation
meh’

Index
Figures

5.1 Donald Judd, installation view, exhibition at the Green Gallery, New York, 1963. Painted
wood and metal
5.2 Carsten Höller, Test Site, October 2006–April 2007, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern
6.1 Sarah Lucas, Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy, 2003. Fibreglass, cigarettes
6.2 Grayson Perry, Boring Cool People, 1999. Glazed ceramic; 63.2 × 26.8 cm, 24.88 × 10.55 in.
7.1 Photograph of double page spread (pp. 390–391) of the June 1955 edition of The
Architectural Review, ‘Outrage’
Contributors

Kevin Aho is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at
Florida Gulf Coast University. He has published widely in the areas of existentialism,
phenomenology and the philosophy of medicine. He is the author of Existentialism: An
Introduction (2014), Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (2009), co-author (with James Aho) of
Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease (2008) and co-editor
(with Charles Guignon) of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (2009).

Antonio Calcagno teaches philosophy and is the author of Lived Experience from the Inside
Out: Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein (2014), Badiou and Derrida: Politics,
Events and Their Time (2007), The Philosophy of Edith Stein (2007) and Giordano Bruno
and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of
Giordano Bruno (1998).

Frances Colpitt, a specialist in American art since 1960, holds the Deedie Rose Chair, an
endowed professorship in contemporary art history, at Texas Christian University in Fort
Worth. She is a corresponding editor for Art in America and the author of Minimal Art:
The Critical Perspective (1990) and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (2002).

Eran Dorfman is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Literature, Tel Aviv University,
specialising in Continental philosophy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is the
author of Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition (2014), Learning to See
the World Anew: Merleau-Ponty Facing the Lacanian Mirror (2007) and the co-editor of
Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms (2010).

Michael E. Gardiner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

His research interests include the political economy of affective life, the everyday, and
utopianism. Author of several books and numerous journal articles, his latest book is Weak
Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (2013).

Elizabeth Goodstein is Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Emory University; she is
 also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature, History, and Philosophy.
She is the author of Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity and Georg
Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, both Stanford University Press.

Julian Jason Haladyn is an art historian and professor at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada.
He is the author of Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom (2014) and Marcel
Duchamp: Étant donnés (2010), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on
art and critical theory.

Martin Hand is an Associate Professor in Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. He is co-

editor of Big Data? (2014), author of Ubiquitous Photography (2012), Making Digital
Cultures (2008) and co-author of The Design of Everyday Life (2007), plus essays about
visual culture, technology and consumption.

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing

editor of Harper’s Magazine. He is the author or co-author of numerous scholarly articles
and eighteen books of political, cultural and aesthetic theory. His most recent books are
the essay collections Unruly Voices (2012) and Measure Yourself Against the Earth (2015).

Jorg Kustermans teaches International Relations at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His
research focuses on the cultural construction of international realities. His English language
work has been published in, among others, Thesis Eleven, Review of International Studies,
Journal of International Relations and Development and Millennium: Journal of
International Studies.

Elizabeth Legge (Department of History of Art, University of Toronto) works on Dada,

Surrealism and contemporary Canadian and British art. She has written books on Max
Ernst and psychoanalysis, and on Michael Snow’s radical New York film of the 1960s,
Wavelength.

Saikat Majumdar is the author of a monograph, Prose of the World (2013 and 2015, Honorable
Mention, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize), and two novels: Silverfish (2007) and
The Firebird (2015, US edition forthcoming 2017). He lives in Delhi and is Professor of
English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

Sharday Mosurinjohn is Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University,

Kingston, Canada. She studies the discursive construction of spirituality and religion, and is
particularly interested in the relationship of these concepts to boredom in the
 contemporary West. She is also an Assistant Editor at the Nonreligion and Secularity
Research Network.

Erik Ringmar teaches at Lund University in Sweden. He has a PhD in political science from
Yale University and has previously worked at the London School of Economics and as
Zhiyuan Chair Professor of International Politics at Shanghai Jiaotong University, China.
His next book will deal with war and willpower.

Barry Sandywell is Honorary Research Fellow in Social Theory in the Department of

Sociology in the University of York, UK. His research is devoted to social analysis and
cultural theory, and is the author of Logological Investigations (3 vols, 1996), Dictionary of
Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms (2011), The Handbook of Visual Culture
(2012, co-edited with Ian Heywood) and The Reflexive Initiative: The Grounds and
Prospects of Analytic Theorizing (2016, co-edited with Stanley Raffel).

Eugenie Shinkle is a photographer, writer and Reader in Photography at the University of

Westminster. Her research focuses predominately on landscape, visual technologies and
fashion photography. She has written and lectured widely on all of these topics and has
been exhibiting her photographic work internationally since 1992.

Lars Svendsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Among his
publications are: A Philosophy of Boredom (2005), Fashion: A Philosophy (2006), A
Philosophy of Fear (2008), Work (2008), A Philosophy of Evil (2010), A Philosophy of
Freedom (2014) and A Philosophy of Loneliness (2016). His books have been translated into
twenty-eight languages.
Acknowledgements

This collection of essays reflects the research and writing of numerous individuals, including
those in this volume, who have invested in the study of boredom. As we began developing
this volume we benefited from the advice and support of Gerhard Boomgaarden, Senior
Publisher at Routledge. We also thank Catherine Gray, Senior Editor, and Alyson Claffey,
Editorial Assistant, for seeing this publication through to completion.
We would like to thank our students, friends and colleagues with whom we have discoursed
at length on the endlessly fascinating topic of boredom. Most of all we wish to acknowledge
the exceptional authors of this collection who, from the begining stages, believed in this
project and wrote the following texts. We thank them for their generous investments in this
volume and overall support throughout all stages of this process. In addition, we had the
benifit of working with several authors not included here whose ideas and support deserve to
be noted, particularly Patrice Petro, Yasmine Musharbash and Laurie Langbauer. Finally, for
their personal support we wish to thank Rita A. Gardiner and Miriam Jordan-Haladyn.
Part I
Introduction
Chapter 1
Monotonous splendour
An introduction to boredom studies

Julian Jason Haladyn and Michael E. Gardiner

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 neo-liberalism 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.

Boredom Studies: a brief early history

Literary, artistic and cultural histories are filled with accounts of emotional and affective
experiences in which the world, and the individuals that populate it, appear to be dull and
banal, without interest, meaning or purpose. These include tedium vitae or horror loci (in the
Greco-Roman literature), acedia (the ‘noonday demon’ mentioned in early Christian texts),
the melancholia made famous by Robert Burton, and ennui, a condition briefly fashionable
among the eighteenth-century literati. While these conditions appear to be very similar to
what we call boredom, a strong case has been made, most powerfully by Goodstein in
Experience without Qualities, for a specifically modern form of boredom that has no direct
analogue in earlier types of subjective malaise. The word ‘boredom’ dates from the 1760s, but
did not come into common usage until decades later, and such variants as ‘to bore’ or ‘boring’
emerged in the nineteenth century (1812 and 1864, respectively). Quite apart from etymology,
boredom in the modern period lacks the weighty metaphysical resonance attributed to
concepts like ennui or even the German Langeweile. Modern boredom is more about
emotional flatness and resigned indifference and therefore lacks the air of the dramatic and
sentimental nostalgia for happier times associated with its antecedents. More significantly,
boredom is a resolutely mass phenomenon that, as Benjamin (1999: 108) notes in The Arcades
Project, ‘began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840s’. Representing a
response to the ‘atrophy of experience’ characteristic of mechanised and urbanised social life,
being bored raised questions about nineteenth-century subjective experience.
But who are some of the more noteworthy cultural and intellectual figures most closely
associated with grappling with, and hence helping to constitute, in discursive and rhetorical
terms, the modern experience of boredom? A selective accounting might include the
following.
Charles Dickens in his 1853 novel Bleak House – published originally in monthly
instalments from March 1852 to September 1853 – is credited with the popularisation of the
term ‘bored’, which appears repeatedly in the first twelve chapters of the book. The main
character associated with this condition is Lady Dedlock, who claims she is ‘bored to death’
and is described as such (Dickens 1996: 21, 27, 111, 158, 182, 196). We are given an overall
sense of the subjective nature of her experience, which is almost completely lacking in drama
and psychological depth. In one instance, Lady Dedlock asks Sir Leicester, her husband, to stop
the carriage they are riding in so that she can ‘walk a little’.
The carriage is stopped, the affectionate man alights from the rumble, opens the door, and lets down the steps, obedient
to an impatient motion of my Lady’s hand. My Lady alights so quickly, and walks away so quickly, that Sir Leicester, for
all his scrupulous politeness, is unable to assist her, and is left behind. A space of a minute or two has elapsed before he
comes up with her. She smiles, looks very handsome, takes his arm, lounges with him for a quarter of a mile, is very much
bored, and resumes her seat in the carriage.
(Dickens 1996: 184)

In opposition to the overtly romantic ennui of the protagonist Werther in Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe’s 1775 Sorrows of Young Werther, Lady Dedlock’s affective condition seems
completely lacking and without profound resonance. She might be more readily compared
with a personage such as Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 Madame Bovary: both
female characters created by male authors, both futilely struggling to hold on to a sense of
meaning and purpose in their lives. ‘Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity,
surrounded by worshipers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her
own shrine’ (Dickens 1996: 196). In Bleak House the word ‘bored’ designates the failure of the
individual to generate consistent and lasting meaning within modern culture, to keep oneself
occupied, an experience that feels like a mental and emotional death.
The Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix will reflect this sentiment in numerous personal
entries of his journals. While retaining certain of the weighty qualities of the term ‘ennui’,
there is in his use of the word an inherent crisis of the meaning more in line with the modern
conception of boredom. In one particular entry, for Sunday 12 September 1852, he notes: ‘I
have been learning pretty thoroughly the truth of the saying that too much liberty leads to
boredom’ (Delacroix 1995: 168). Far from a grand gesture or overdetermined sense of self,
here the artist recognises being bored as a shared personal problematic emerging from the
cultural celebration of unfailing individual autonomy and freedom – a liberty that, when not
enacted or kept up, causes a sense of meaninglessness that makes one question the purpose of
life. Delacroix will continue to resist this problematic, but successive artists within the
modernist and avant-garde tradition begin to adapt and mobilise boredom’s qualities in the
development of a critical visual discourse; a potential for cultural critique that, at its most
positive, can be understood as a will to boredom (see Haladyn 2015). The poet Charles
Baudelaire, who would champion Delacroix’s passion for artistic passions, understood the
larger implications of this ‘anti-historicism that elevates beauty over truth, feeling over reason,
experience over abstract knowledge’ (Goodstein 2005: 8). These concerns signal the beginnings
of the aesthetic programme of modern boredom that take as its base the discontents of
subjective experience.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the first philosopher of boredom, locates the experience of being
bored within the question of an individual’s ability to exercise their will in the world. As he
writes in the first volume of his 1818 The World as Will and Representation:
Now the nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on and on; in fact his
happiness and well-being consist only in the transition from desire to satisfaction, and from this to a fresh desire, such
transition going forward rapidly. For the non-appearance of satisfaction is suffering; the empty longing for a new desire is
languor, boredom.
(Schopenhauer 1969: 260)

This early consideration – by a thinker who (reluctantly), following in his father’s footsteps,
began working as a merchant before taking up philosophy – positions the concept of boredom
as one extreme of a continuum that has as its other extreme the fulfilment of desire. He
describes this in different ways. In one of his more commonly cited statements he notes: ‘life
swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its
ultimate constituents’ (Schopenhauer 1969: 312). More succinctly, and in a slightly varied
understanding, he writes in a later text: ‘Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of
human life’ (Schopenhauer 2004: 45). Concerned primarily with notions of self and freedom as
exercised within modern life, boredom for Schopenhauer is an acute episode of subjective
representation that is driven and defined by a never-ending lack, experienced as both personal
and societal. He thus imagines being bored as a necessary by-product of living in a post-
Kantian world of phenomena, where personal interest and its maintenance are made the
responsibility of the individual who must willingly find – or create – meaning within lived
experience.
Boredom is anything but an evil to be thought of lightly; ultimately it depicts on the countenance real despair. It causes
beings who love one another as little as men do, to seek one another so much, and thus becomes the source of sociability.
(Schopenhauer 1969: 313)

A pessimist at heart, Schopenhauer will balance what might be considered the negative and
positive poles of boredom’s effects on the individual by recognising in this swinging pendulum
an unavoidable will to life driving the self ever forward, dooming it to seek in life something
that is beyond its limits.
Søren Kierkegaard, who was well versed in Schopenhauer’s writings, made his own
significant contributions to the conceptualisation of boredom within modernity. Approaching
the act of being bored with a similar pessimism, Kierkegaard in his 1843 Either/Or: A
Fragment of Life – published pseudonymously under the name Victor Eremita – will define
this modern condition in its most unequivocally negative valuation: ‘Boredom is a root of all
evil’ (Kierkegaard 2004: 227). What does this mean? Speaking from a position of belief, here
he replaces the well-worn claim derived from Scripture that idleness is a root of evil (as in the
saying ‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop’) with an alternative prohibition that has boredom
at its origin. ‘Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly
divine way of life so long as one is not bored’ (Kierkegaard 2004: 230). In idleness he sees a
necessary challenge every individual within modern culture must face, to be happy being idle;
failing to appreciate and prosper from idleness leads to boredom, which becomes ‘evil’ when
one is unable to escape ‘this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this
superficial profundity’ (Kierkegaard 1989: 285). The ‘demonic’ quality of boredom is the
(negative) promise of its contentlessness, which challenges an individual’s overall sense of a
purposeful existence. It is boredom’s status as an existential mood that is at issue for
Kierkegaard, its power to drain the life out of life by convincing the individual – and a society
of such individuals – that the world lacks inherent possibility, or even the possibility of such
possibility. Yet, in this double negative he also sees the necessary motivation that can drive the
individual away from such ‘evil’ – ideally, in his estimation, towards faith. ‘Strange that
boredom, so still and static, should have such power to set things in motion. The effect that
boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion’
(Kierkegaard 2004: 227).
Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard form the theoretical nexus for the early exploration of
boredom as a critical concept that addresses the problematics of subjective existence within
modernity. In both we witness how personal and societal responses to being bored are held up
as a negative ideal of life in the modern world – when, in the face of increased freedoms and
possibilities, people are ‘bored to death’. In this schema boredom (as mood) becomes either a
‘root of all evil’ or a point of resistance or repulsion against which the individual is, or more
precisely can be – through subjective will – set in motion. ‘For Kierkegaard, the senselessness
of a godless existence catapults the one who reflects on the direction of faith; for
Schopenhauer, this utter futility itself becomes the stuff of transcendence, a means of
overcoming the attachment to the illusion of self’ (Goodstein 2005: 159). Such is the pendulum
of modern boredom as it reaches epidemic proportions in the mid-nineteenth century.
One of the prominent inheritors of this problematic is Friedrich Nietzsche who, early in his
career, addressed boredom in his 1874 Untimely Meditation on Schopenhauer. A text that at
once celebrates Schopenhauer’s philosophy and begins to imagine something beyond its
pessimism, Nietzsche here struggles to come to terms with many presumptions of the modern
world – progress, universal education, nationhood – that are tasked with giving meaning to
the individual (on the level of the social), so-called ‘freedoms’ that take away from the
necessary striving of the will.
That freedom is in fact a heavy debt which can be discharged only by means of great deeds. In truth, every ordinary son
of earth has the right to regard with resentment a man favoured in this way: only may some god guard him from being
thus favoured himself, that is from becoming so fearfully indebted. For he would at once perish of his freedom and
solitude, and become a fool, and a malicious fool at that, out of boredom.
(Nietzsche 2008: 183)

While boredom does not play a prominent role in Nietzsche’s overall philosophy, its presence
at the beginning stages of the development of his theory of will is significant. There is a
motivated sense of optimism in his ideas, expressed famously in his conception of the will to
power, which departs from the mere disenchantments of modern life we have been discussing.
Georg Simmel (1986: 5) will attribute this change to the emergence of Charles Darwin’s
evolutionary theories, which quite literally separate Schopenhauer’s conceptions of will from
those of Nietzsche. Boredom retains its power of repulsion, yet there is a genuine sense of the
possibilities inherent in its ability to force individuals to question their existence, even question
human existence as a whole – on its most grand scales.
The old God, wholly ‘spirit’, wholly high priest, wholly perfection, takes a stroll in his garden: but he is bored. Even gods
cannot escape boredom. What does he do? He invents human beings, – the human is entertaining…. But look, even the
human is bored.
(Nietzsche 2009: 46)
The freedom to be bored – whether as ‘god’ or human – comes with a creative debt that is
fulfilled only through great deeds, which for Nietzsche is the drive that defines the impetus of
humanity’s being.
Martin Heidegger will develop this understanding of boredom in a series of lectures he
gave from 1929 to 1930, published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Devoting
sections 18 to 39 towards his theorisation of boredom, the most extensive treatment of the
subject done up to his day, he will focus on some of the most basic questions related to the act
of being bored. He will, in fact, ask the question we began with: ‘Boredom – what is it?’ Here
is his immediate answer:
Boredom, Langeweile – whatever its ultimate essence may be – shows, particularly in our German word, an almost
obvious relation to time, a way in which we stand with respect to time, a feeling of time. Boredom and the question of
boredom thus lead us to the problem of time. We must first let ourselves enter the problems of time, in order to determine
boredom as a particular relation to it. Or is it the other way around, does boredom first lead us to time, to an
understanding of how time resonates in the ground of Da-sein and how it is only because of this that we can ‘act’ and
‘manoeuvre’ in our customary superficial way? Or are we failing to ask correctly concerning either the first relation –
that of boredom to time – or the second – that of time to boredom?
(Heidegger 1995: 80)

Following Kierkegaard, Heidegger will regard boredom as a mood – the ‘fundamental mood’
– in which self is recognised in and through its inability to see past itself, functioning in this
way as ‘the fundamental attunement of our philo-sophizing, in which we develop the three
questions of world, finitude, and individuation’ (Heidegger 1995: 81). These questions are
posed in relation to the problem of time, which for Heidegger resonates through the self’s
experience of being bored, a condition that is progressive and ultimately metaphysical. He
provides three stages or forms – being-bored-by, being-bored-with and it-is-boring – that
mark the move from superficial boredom (the first two), when experience is tethered to either
subject or object, towards a profound boredom that speaks about a state of being in the world,
not as self but as ‘one’: ‘it is boring for one’. Near the end of his discussion of boredom
Heidegger provides another definition based in a summary of the three stages:
Boredom is the entrancement of the temporal horizon, an entrancement which lets the moment of vision belonging to
temporality vanish. In thus letting it vanish, boredom impels entranced Dasein into the moment of vision as the properly
authentic possibility of its existence, an existence only possible in the midst of beings as a whole, and within the horizon
of entrancement, their telling refusal of themselves as a whole.
(Heidegger 1995: 153)

Hannah Arendt develops a unique albeit highly focused philosophy of boredom, one that at
least in part responds to questions of will and being. While there are scattered references to
boredom and related ideas throughout her writings and correspondence, it is her idea of the
‘banality of evil’ from her 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil –
originally published in The New Yorker and expanded into a book – that is of most interest.
Working within the discourse of boredom, she proposes a critical conception of ‘evil’ not based
within an overt or overdetermined sense of being but rather through a discernible lack of
individual will that leads to the violence of evil deeds. Whereas many believed (even needed)
Adolf Eichmann to be a monstrous killer, Arendt recognised in him not an active malevolence
but rather an almost submissive sense of his own complicities in the events of the Holocaust;
his actions, rather than being part of a larger cultural or ethical perspective, reflected no
higher purpose or understanding then that of his own immediate existence. ‘The humdrum of
military service, that was something I couldn’t stand, day after day always the same, over and
over again the same’, she quotes him as saying. It is this aversion to the ‘humdrum’ that
Eichmann provides as his reason for taking the position. Arendt continues: ‘Thus bored to
distraction, he heard that the Security Service of the Reichsführer S.S.’ – clarifying this as
‘Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst’ – ‘had jobs open, and applied immediately’ (Arendt 2006: 35).
The entire account of Eichmann’s life and trial is punctuated by moments of his boredom that
remain almost always banal in intention – at the very least bureaucratic – but ‘evil’ in result,
in the deaths caused by his inability or unwillingness to see beyond his own desires. With the
critical concept of the banality of evil Arendt initiates an important stream of boredom
research that examines acts of being bored in relation to violence. Additionally, given her
perspective as a woman, Arendt’s philosophy also serves as a point of reference for the
development in the twentieth century of a feminist discourse that uses the banality of
boredom as a vital mode of cultural critique.
Walter Benjamin represents an alternative extension of Nietzsche’s treatment of boredom,
one that provides the condition with its most positive expressions. There is a poetry to
Benjamin’s understanding of an individual’s experience of being bored, one that has wide
cultural ramifications. In his 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’ he locates the idea of boredom at the
heart of a process of attempting to recover shared experience within modern culture. As
Benjamin writes:
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting place – the activities that are
intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this
the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.
(Benjamin 1968: 91)

As a ‘dream bird’ boredom becomes the point at which an individual is mentally relaxed
enough, as if in a dream-state, allowing experience to move beyond the eternal return of the
same that defines much of modern existence. Benjamin’s most concentrated consideration of
boredom comes in convolute ‘D’ of the Arcades Project, his unfinished grand work written
between 1927 and 1940 – in which the concept ‘boredom’ is paired with the Nietzschean idea
of ‘eternal return’, both relating to questions of history. Among the various quotations from
historical sources that address, directly or obliquely, the idea of being bored, Benjamin adds his
own fragmented claims. ‘Boredom is a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most
lustrous and colourful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream’. Boredom is
the greyness of experience within everyday life that contains within it something special, a
possibility that can only be realised by an individual’s desire to see more than is given:
‘Boredom is always the external surface of unconscious events’ (Benjamin 1999: 105, 106). This
is why he considers boredom to be a threshold, one that individuals must necessarily pass or
work through. In this we can rightly claim Benjamin as the first thinker to identify in boredom
a quality that is not just an effect of living under the conditions of modernity, but instead ‘as
perhaps the quintessential experience of modern life’ (Moran 2003: 168). Being bored provides
a means of allowing both individual and society an imaginative mental space, away from the
proscribed meanings given on the surface of life’s experiences, one that culturally and
historically is needed for the possibility of accomplishing great deeds. He questions the basis of
our ability to recognise meaning in life:
We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the
expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold of great deeds. Now, it would be important to
know: What is the dialectical antithesis of boredom?
(Benjamin 1999: 105)

But he also hints equally that the most historically efficacious of these possibilities must,
ultimately, involve enhanced human solidarity and forms of collective agency.

Boredom Studies
What should be evident from the preceding discussion is that boredom is a complex, dynamic
and ambivalent phenomenon, incorporating a spectrum of often contradictory experiences,
subjective intensities and possibilities that, arguably, give us privileged insight into the
vicissitudes of our modern condition. For her part, Petro (1996: 158) suggests that this can be
explained to some extent by boredom’s status as ‘an empty and an overflowing conceptual
category – empty because it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning, overflowing and
excessive because even when it appears fixed it still contains within it definitions that are
denied or suppressed’. As alluded to above, boredom’s frustratingly ambiguous and prolix
nature has prompted much arcane, and at times seemingly fruitless philosophical speculation.
This situation even prompted Heidegger (1995: 82) to declare abruptly, amidst one of his
characteristically protracted and labyrinthine excurses in The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics, ‘can even boredom be boring in the end?’ Given the state of current fascination
with the topic, in both the popular arena and proliferating domains of scholarly inquiry, the
answer would appear to be ‘no’. Perhaps this is because it is both a common and well-nigh
universal occurrence, but also insofar as Petro notes perceptively, boredom is capable of
generating endless new significances, even though – paradoxically – being bored in
experiential terms is, at its fundament, about lack or absence. For instance, there have been a
number of major academic conferences on the subject, and more planned in the future,
including the now annual ‘Boring’ gathering in London, England that began in 2011; the
satirical ‘Boredom Awards’ held in Canada in 2013; the documentary film Boredom: The
Movie, released in 2012; as well as countless blogs and web pages devoted to this issue. And, as
anyone who teaches this topic will doubtless testify, normally listless and, well, bored students
can discourse endlessly on it, and with great enthusiasm.
Given this, if we understand ‘Boredom Studies’ as an emerging (but increasingly
recognisable) field of scholarly inquiry, what are the prevailing themes that define its
parameters, as reflected in the work of these (and other) nineteenth- and twentieth-century
thinkers, but also with regard to more recent conceptual innovations in the areas of
technology and media studies, political economy and critical theory, among other areas? Some
of the more salient motifs and questions could be said to include the following:

1. The first concerns the methods by which boredom’s experiential and subjective
contours might be subject to more precise and rigorous description. This includes
existing methods of phenomenological accounting, of which Heidegger’s rendering of
boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics remains exemplary, whatever
one makes of the philosophical baggage he attaches to it, but also vis-à-vis more
contemporaneous theories of affect, embodiment, perception and so on (e.g. Crary
1999; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Rhym 2012; Gorfinkel 2012). Furthermore, how
does boredom relate to similar and often overlapping (yet not entirely coterminous)
moods and affective conditions, which would include feelings of alienation, anxiety,
depression and indifference? The overarching goal would be something like a
Geertzian ‘thick description’ of boredom (see Geertz 1973), albeit in relation to a
wider ‘ecology of affects’.
2. The second area of import might be said to involve boredom’s normative or ethical
significance, turning on the existential failure on the part of the modern subject to
find meaning in the modern world. That is to say – to what extent is boredom an
ethical ‘problem’, and what would it mean to diagnose it as such? Is there a relation
between boredom and what could be termed ‘radical’ or ‘metaphysical’ evil (see
Koehn 2005)? Is there a difference between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ states of
boredom (see Fenichel 1953), and, if so, does the latter necessitate therapy or
intervention in some quasi-psychoanalytic sense? Finally, what normative position(s)
might be taken up with respect to boredom, understood not as an idiosyncratic and
 hence trivial form of personal suffering, but as mass psychopathology, with myriad
implications for society generally (e.g. Calhoun 2011; Fromm 1986; Gilliam 2013)?
3. The above considerations raise, in turn, a host of questions about boredom’s
sociohistorical constitution in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction. To wit:
what are the broader social, politico-economic, and cultural conditions that give rise
to mass boredom, and how can we supplement types of phenomenological
description with an understanding of these wider dynamics? This is an urgent task,
insofar as, Heidegger (1995: 88) reminds us, boredom is a fundamentally ‘hybrid’
phenomenon, both objective and subjective. Can, for instance, different instantiations
of boredom be linked to discrete phases of capitalist development, including
transformations in our experience of space-time as a result of rapidly-consolidating
technologies of transportation and communications? Does our late modern world of
information overload and compulsory forms of digitalised connectivity ‘on demand’,
arguably resulting in the ‘fractalisation’ and subsequent problematisation of
qualitatively-experienced time, precipitate a different kind of boredom than that
typically experienced in an earlier period, wherein forms of repetitive and stultifying
industrial labour were the norm (see Gardiner 2012, 2014)? Furthermore, how does
boredom manifest itself with respect to such diverse phenomena as social class, race
and ethnicity, gender and sexuality (e.g. Johnson and Lloyd 2004; Petro 1996), or in
relation to the differential spaces, places and institutional sites, both domestic and
public, of late modernity (e.g. Aho 2007; Anderson 2004; Baghdadchi 2005; Gehring
1997)? And, insofar as these processes mainly concern the overdeveloped world, how
can we understand boredom along more globalised lines, especially in terms of the
historical experience of imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism? (see Auerbach
2005; Musharbash 2007). Finally, how does boredom relate to the ‘post-human’ (given
the increasingly ‘impure’ nature of human affects and activities, concerning their
inexorable integration into mechanised and computerised systems and networks), or
even the nonhuman (for instance, the vexed question of whether animals can be
bored) (see Agamben 2004)?
4. What issues of a more overtly political nature does the study of boredom throw up?
Does a bored subjectivity always bolster conformity, inure us to the pallid
blandishments of late capitalist commodity culture, as the Situationists argued,
exemplified by their pithy slogan ‘Boredom is always counterrevolutionary’? For that
matter, is the study, diagnosis and ‘treatment’ of boredom something that can be
marshalled, in biopolitical fashion, so as to uphold dominant mechanisms of social
control and capital accumulation, especially through exigencies of work and
consumption? Or, alternatively, can certain manifestations of boredom help to
precipitate, or at least prepare the ground for, critical agencies that gesture towards,
 however tentatively or inchoately, more autonomous forms of meaning-construction,
in a world that always teeters on the brink of nihilism (see Clare 2012; Waite 1992/3)?
And, if some boredoms resist the drift towards reification and abstraction inculcated
by the very nature of modernity itself, thereby opening a space for radical possibility
and transformative praxis, could boredom itself be said to be a ‘contentless longing’
closely related to specifically utopian desires and propensities that could, at least
theoretically, take on more concrete form (see Osborne 2006)?
5. There are also a series of challenging issues that could be addressed as to the relation
between boredom, on the one hand, and particular artistic and cultural practices, on
the other. How, for example, is boredom dealt with or shaped by specific artworks
and cultural discourses, understood in terms of both overt content (accounts or
treatments of boredom as a central thematic in pop culture, cinema, literature, music,
etc.), as well as explorations of the formal possibilities of boredom through
evocations of banality, fatigue, inattention, repetition or silence? This equally
concerns, in addition, the panoply of commentaries and interpretations that relate
symbiotically to cultural and artistic practices themselves, or what we could term,
more broadly, the ‘aesthetics of boredom’ (e.g. Misek 2010; Priest 2013; Shinkle 2004).
6. As many contributors to this volume take pains to argue, the most fertile approach to
the topic of boredom is of a necessarily interdisciplinary – or, better, post-disciplinary
– nature. Notwithstanding this, what are the subfields of a (still-nascent) Boredom
Studies, in addition to those already alluded to? Would they (tentatively) include such
domains of scholarly inquiry as, for instance, social science (anthropology,
criminology, education, social psychology and sociology – especially organisational
and occupational sociology – and political science); more popular, ‘journalistic’
sources (including blog commentaries, Facebook postings, documentary films, etc.);
the philosophy of religion, as well as the related field of theological scholarship; and
any number of scientific and medical fields, including studies of neurophysiology,
bodily and emotional fatigue, perception and attention, and so forth? (We would,
however, advance the caveat here that these domains should be more attentive to
existing work in critical social theory and the humanities on boredom than they have
typically been hitherto.)

In his A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen (2005) argues that, as complex and ineffable a
phenomenon boredom is, understood as either concept or direct experience, in its ‘profound’
existential form it fundamentally concerns the inability of subjects, either individually or
collectively, to sustain a viable project of meaning-creation when faced with the task of living
in a demythologised and hyper-rationalised world. Modernity, unlike previous social
formations, valorises the notion of perpetual self-actualisation, in which every aspect of our
choices and actions must have valid personal worth, implying that daily life, in and of itself,
must always be ‘interesting’. (It is certainly worth noting, as many have done, that the words
‘boredom’ and ‘interesting’ came into being historically at roughly the same time.) For
Svendsen, the burden to always be interesting, and to continually find things of interest, is a
deep-seated legacy of Romanticism, and an often insurmountable task, leaving us frustrated
and eventually bored. Fundamentally, then, boredom is the price we must pay for living in a
thoroughly mechanised and disenchanted world. Svendsen’s own recommendation is
noteworthy: he exhorts us to abandon the quixotic search for grandiose, transcendental
sublimity characteristic of Romanticism and its epigones, seeking instead to cultivate more
mundane and fleeting meanings, pleasures and satisfactions, however fragile and limited these
might be, so as to inoculate ourselves against boredom’s yawning void.
The point is that modern time is never as completely ‘empty’ and ‘homogeneous’ as
Benjamin occasionally intimates. Although our era has been utterly desacralised, and indeed
irreversibly so, this does not wholly evacuate immanent, qualitative meaning from our
apperception and experience of temporality itself. Furthermore, there always remain more
robust possibilities as well, concerning the power of the collective and our capacity for ‘fellow
feeling’ to circumvent the effects of pervasive isolation, alienation and boredom, if hopefully
not at the expense of our receptivity to radical alterity or otherness (see Erfani 2004).
Paraphrasing the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1998: 232), the demise of the
mythopoetic realm might well be the midwife of existential ‘tedium’, or boredom by another
name. But, such disenchantment also generates myriad human possibilities that our pre-
modern forbears could never have envisaged in their wildest dreams. The task still remains
one of turning ‘contingency’ into ‘destiny’, as philosopher Agnes Heller (1990) once put it. That
is our inescapable fate as modern subjects, bored or otherwise, which is why we must
immerse ourselves, not only in the intellectual and sociocultural politics evidenced ‘by’
boredom, but also the ‘struggles conducted in, around, against, and for boredom’ (Waite
1992/3: 97).

Bibliography

Agamben, G. (2004) Profound Boredom, in G. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 63–70.
Aho, K. A. (2007) ‘Acceleration and Time Pathologies: The Critique of Psychology in
Heidegger’s Beiträge’, Time & Society, 16(1): 25–42.
Anderson, B. (2004) ‘Time-Stilled Space-Slowed: How Boredom Matters’, Geoforum, 35: 739–
754.
Arendt, H. (2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Penguin
Books.
Auerbach, J. (2005) ‘Imperial Boredom’, Common Knowledge, 11(2): 283–305.
Baghdadchi, A. (2005) ‘On Academic Boredom’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education,
4(3), 319–324.
Benjamin, W. (1968) The Storyteller, in W. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, H.
Arendt ed. New York: Schocken Books, 83–109.
Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project, H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin trans. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press.
Calhoun, C. (2011) ‘Living with Boredom’, Sophia, 50: 269–279.
Clare, R. (2012) ‘The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster
Wallace’s The Pale King’, Studies in the Novel, 44(4): 428–446.
Crary, J. (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Debord, G. (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, D. Nicholson-Smith trans. New York: Zone
Books.
Delacroix, E. (1995) The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, L. Norton trans. London: Phaidon Press.
Dickens, C. (1996) Bleak House, London: Penguin Books.
Erfani, F. (2004) ‘Sartre and Kierkegaard on the Aesthetics of Boredom’, Idealistic Studies,
34(3): 303–317.
Fenichel, O. (1953) On the Psychology of Boredom, in O. Fenichel, The Collected Papers of Otto
Fenichel: First Series, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 292–302.
Fromm, E. (1986) Affluence and Ennui in Our Society, in E. Fromm, For the Love of Life, New
York: The Free Press, 1–38.
Gardiner, M. E. (2012) ‘Henri Lefebvre and the “Sociology of Boredom”’, Theory, Culture and
Society, 29(2): 37–62.
Gardiner, M. E. (2014) ‘The Multitude Strikes Back? Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism’,
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 82: 31–48.
Geertz, C. (1973) Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, in C. Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1–30.
Gehring, V. V. (1997) ‘Tedium Vitae: Or, My Life as a “Net Serf”’, Ratio, 10(2): 124–140.
Gilliam, C. A. R. (2013) ‘Existential Boredom Re-examined: Boredom as Authenticity and Life-
Affirmation’, Existential Analysis, 24(2): 250–262.
Goodstein, E. (2005) Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Gorfinkel, E. (2012) ‘Weariness, Waiting: Enduration and Art Cinema’s Tired Bodies’,
Discourse, 34(2–3): 311–347.
Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke
 University Press.
Haladyn, J. (2015) Boredom and Art: Passions of the Will to Boredom, Winchester, UK: Zero
Books.
Heidegger, M. (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, W.
McNeill and N., Walker trans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Heller, A. (1990) Can Modernity Survive?, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Johnson, L. and Lloyd, J. (2004) Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife,
Oxford and New York: Berg.
Kierkegaard, S. (1989) The Concept of Irony, H. Hong and E. Hong trans. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (2004) Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, A. Hannay trans. London: Penguin Books.
Koehn, D. (2005) Evil as Flight from Narcissistic Boredom, in D. Koehn, The Nature of Evil,
New York and Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 63–85.
Kuhn, R. (1976) The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Misek, R. (2010) ‘Dead Time: Cinema, Heidegger, and Boredom’, Continuum: Journal of Media
& Cultural Studies, 24(5), 777–778.
Moran, J. (2003) ‘Benjamin and Boredom’, Critical Quarterly, 45(1–2): 168–181.
Musharbash, Y. (2007) ‘Boredom, Time and Modernity: An Example from Aboriginal
Australia’, American Anthropologist, 109(2): 307–317.
Nietzsche, F. (2008) Untimely Meditations, R. J. Hollingdale trans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2009) The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, J.
Norman trans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Osborne, P. (2006) ‘The Dreambird of Experience: Utopia, Possibility, Boredom’, Radical
Philosophy, 137(May/June): 36–44.
Pessoa, F. (1998) The Book of Disquiet, A. Mac Adam trans. Boston, MA: Exact Change.
Petro, P. S. (1996) Historical Ennui, Feminist Boredom, in V. Sobchack ed., The Persistence of
History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, New York and London: Routledge,
187–199.
Petro, P. S. (2000) ‘Boredom’, Public: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Culture, and Ideas,
19: 30–31.
Petro, P. S. (2002) Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Priest, E. (2013) Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure,
New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Rhym, J. (2012) ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Cinematic Mood: Boredom and the Affect of
Time in Antonioni’s L’eclisse’, New Literary History, 43(3): 477–501.
Schopenhauer, A. (1969) The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, E. F. J. Payne trans.
New York: Dover.
Schopenhauer, A. (2004) Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale trans. London: Penguin
Books.
Shinkle, E. (2004) ‘Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the
Aesthetics of the Banal’, Mosaic, 37(4): 165–184.
Simmel, G. (1986) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, H. Loiskandl, D. Weinstein and M. Weinstein
trans. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.
Spacks, P. M. (1996) Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Svendsen, L. (2005) A Philosophy of Boredom, London: Reaktion Books.
Waite, G. (1992/3) ‘On the Politics of Boredom (A Communist Pastiche)’, Documents, 1–2: 93–
109.
Part II
Boredom and subjectivity
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Müller, F., 54
Müller, Sophus, 420, 435
Munda-Kol, 98, 486
Muskogean, 100, 359
Mutations, 239
Mycenæ, 246, 420, 423
Mycenæan, 420, 457, 458, 459

Nabonidus, 434
Nabu, 256
Nahua, Nahuatl, 105, 116, 134, 338, 346, 347, 359.
See also Aztec
Napoleon, 5
Naram-sin, 434
Nasal index, 38
Nashville, 70
Natal, 67
Nationality, 56, 111
Naturalism in art, 177, 402, 408, 456, 458, 502
Navaho, 116, 187, 188, 190, 236, 252, 296
Neandertal, 32, 48, 64, 110, 139, 155, 395, 396, 400, 404, 405,
472;
Neandertaloid, 403, 497
Near East, 207, 417, 426, 437, 442, 443, 474
Nebuchadnezzar, 434, 451
Needle, 165, 349, 396, 412, 423
Negrillo, 502
Negrito, 39, 41, 45, 46, 52, 55, 73, 486, 490
Negro, 3, 28, 32, 36, 39, 41, 44, 45, 52, 58, 77, 79, 84, 105,
106, 111, 196, 205, 477, 495-502, 505
Negroid, 30, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49, 53, 55, 62, 73, 155, 344,
395, 404, 476, 486, 487, 488, 490, 492, 497, 503, 504, 505
Neolithic, 30, 142, 144, 146, 168, 170, 177, 344, 348, 394, 395,
402, 406, 408, 410-416, 426, 429, 432, 433, 434, 435, 437,
438, 442, 444-446, 450, 456, 458-460, 462, 473, 478, 492,
496, 501, 504;
Early Neolithic, 143, 410, 412, 413, 426, 428, 429;
Full Neolithic, 143, 145, 396, 410, 413, 416, 426, 430, 435,
446, 450
Nestorian, 291, 454, 475
Net, 349
Nevada, 296, 303
New Empire, 446, 448
New Grange, 420
New Guinea, 45, 98, 213, 232, 234, 487, 490, 492
New Mexico, 187, 251, 294, 296, 304, 310
New Orleans, 70
New Stone Age, see Neolithic
New-year rites, 312-315
New York, 78, 79
Nicaragua, 336
Nicknames, 236
Nicobar, 486
Niger, 502
Nile, 105, 440, 442, 444, 445, 457, 497, 504
Nippur, 247
Noah, 96
Nordic, 39, 41-43, 55, 82, 460, 476, 506
Northeast area, Northern Woodland, 295, 336, 341, 355, 385,
386, 389, 391
North Sea, 43, 419, 427
Northwest area, North Pacific Coast, 235, 253, 295, 317, 336,
340, 355, 357, 360, 361, 363, 368, 373, 375, 387, 388, 391,
459
Norwegian, 111
Nubian, 54
Numbers, holy, 252
Numerals, Arabic, 230, 275, 482;
position, 230;
Roman, 230
Nutka, 295

Oats, 415, 416, 468

Obercassel, 27, 28
Oblique eye, 44
Obstacle Pursuit, see Magic Flight
Occident, 467, 471, 476, 477
Oceania, 44, 45, 49, 98, 235, 259, 471, 478, 487, 492, 505
Odyssey, 422
Ofnet, 157
Ogham, 425
Ohio Valley, 212, 373, 386
Old Kingdom, 446, 448
Old Stone Age, see Palæolithic
Oligocene, 18, 148
Omaha, 294, 303
Orang-utan, 13, 32, 64
Oregon, 303, 313
Orient, 395, 413, 415, 417, 418, 426, 427, 430-432, 435, 437,
438, 457, 459, 461, 462, 479, 499
Oriental mirage, 437
Orinoco, 338
Orthodox, 257
Ostrich, 497, 501
Overblowing, 227
Overlapping, 36, 39
Over-tones, 227

Pagoda, 460
Palæo-Asiatic, 475
Palæolithic, 23, 63, 142-179, 345, 348, 350, 390, 393-410, 413,
426, 433, 470, 495, 501, 504;
Lower, 151, 154, 161, 172, 395-410, 411, 426, 444-446,
477;
Upper, 27, 29, 151, 154, 155, 161, 165, 395-410, 411, 412,
426, 427, 444, 445, 478, 496, 504
Palæozoic, 15
Palawan, 290
Palestine, 183, 305, 440, 454, 457
Pali, 11, 291
Panama, 351, 440, 441
Pan’s pipes, 226, 382
Pantheon, 249, 251
Papago, 184
Paper, 426, 468;
money, 468, 474
Papua, Papuan, 45, 52, 54, 55, 98, 487, 492
Parallelism, Parallels, 197, 198, 216-240, 261, 262, 268, 269,
281, 327-329;
in language, 119;
primary, 223, 225;
secondary, 220
Paris, 214
Parsis, Parsees, 302, 452, 481
Parthenon, 244
Parthia, 452
Patagonia, Patagonian area, 53, 338, 345, 373, 378, 383, 384,
387
Patrilinear descent, 232, 331, 344-360, 493, 500
Pattern, 130, 199, 367, 467, 481, 482, 493, 494, 498
Patwin, 307, 309
Pawnee, 369
Pea, 414
Peat, 428
Pebbles, painted, 407
Pegu, 485
Peking, 461
Penutian languages, 125
Pericles, Periclean, 83
Périgord, 27, 29
Permutations, 225, 376
Peripheral, see marginal
Persia, Persian, 95, 104, 204, 221, 259, 261, 302, 417, 423,
447, 450, 451, 452, 454, 459, 479, 484
Peru, 105, 125, 203, 228, 240, 260, 327, 338, 341, 348, 361,
362, 369, 370, 372, 374, 378-381, 440, 442, 504
Peschel, 51
Pessimism, 479, 482
Phalanx, 129
Phidias, 425
Philippines, 45, 209, 210, 289, 290, 335, 372
Philistine, 184, 423, 457, 458
Philology, 485
Philosophy, 478, 479, 480, 482, 483
Phœnicia, Phœnician, 96, 184, 207, 265, 269, 270-272, 274,
285, 438, 442, 451, 454, 455, 457, 505
Phonetic law, 94
Phonetic writing, 263, 449
Phrygians, 452
Pictographs, picture-writing, 224, 263, 378
Pig, see swine
Piltdown, 15, 22, 23, 26, 64, 110, 154
Pilum, 129
Pima, 181, 187, 190, 356
Pipe, 211
Pitch, absolute, 226, 227
Pithecanthropus, 14, 19, 21-23, 26, 30, 32, 64, 139, 140, 147,
154
Pit-loom, 499
Pizarro, 203
Plains area, 236, 294, 295, 336, 340, 355, 366, 368, 369, 386
Planets, 225, 254, 377
Plateau area, 236, 295, 336, 388, 391
Platinum, 373
Plato, 425
Pleistocene, 18, 19, 26, 110, 147-150, 154, 344, 404, 406, 444
Pliocene, 18, 148
Plow, 416, 418, 423, 462, 469, 479
Poles, Poland, 76, 77, 78, 401
Polished stone, see ground stone
Polygyny, 500
Polynesia, Polynesian, 39, 41, 42, 46, 52, 53, 65, 67, 98, 124,
145, 182, 232, 236, 260, 350, 487-491, 505
Polysynthetic languages, 100, 102
Pomo, 120, 307
Pompeii, 256
Poncho, 363
Pope, 276
Porcelain, 426, 448, 467
Portugal, Portuguese, 213, 246, 407, 420, 432, 489
Postglacial, 28
Potato, 280, 468
Potlatch, 388
Pottery, 143, 188, 189, 211, 315, 316, 319, 353, 370, 379, 383,
385, 389, 410, 411, 416, 426, 427, 429, 434, 441, 444-446,
448, 450, 456, 458, 467, 469, 470, 489, 491, 492
Potter’s wheel, 418, 425, 456, 458
Predmost, 29, 157, 403, 412
Predynastic, 443, 444, 446
Pre-Chellean, 154, 399
Pre-Mousterian, 398, 400
Priest, 188, 209, 254, 267, 294, 358, 363, 367, 369, 381, 469,
479, 481, 482
Primates, 11, 13, 152
Printing, 468
Prismatic flake, 162, 164
Prognathism, 24, 30, 38, 41, 56, 62
Progress, 292
Promiscuity, 331
Prophets, 455
Protestantism, 258
Proto-American, 388
Proto-Caucasian, 44, 344, 476, 477
Proto-Mongoloid, 343, 344
Proto-Neolithic, 409, 410
Proverbs, 196, 400
Psychology, 225, 226, 237, 239, 325, 362, 447
Ptolemaic, 208, 255, 447
Ptolemy, 255
Puberty rites, 365, 366
Pueblo, 181, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 296, 305, 332, 356, 358,
359, 366-370, 377, 378, 384
Punjab, 287, 480
Pulse, 65
Punic, 270
Pygmies, 45, 502
Pyramid, 242, 358, 371, 386, 433, 446-447, 458
Pyrenees, 104, 400, 406, 407

Quadroon, 80
Quipus, 378
Quaternary, 18, 149
Quebec, 217
Quechua, 100, 105, 134, 346, 347

Race, 326, 460;

classification, 34-57;
concept, 3-6, 56, 57, 396, 481, 504-506;
fossil, 11-33;
problems, 58-86
Radiations, 437, 497
Rain-coat, 469
Rajah, 210
Rameses, 422
Rationalization, 59, 60, 277, 281, 283, 438
Rattan, 489, 502, 503
Raven legends, 218
Realism in art, see naturalism
Reason, 276, 277, 292
Rebirth, 479, 482
Rebus writing, 223, 263-268, 291, 329, 330, 378
Recent, 18, 149, 445
Red Sea, 287, 451
Reform, 275, 276
Reindeer, 151, 152, 154, 165, 176, 177, 406, 475
Rejects, 144
Relativity of standards, 127
Renaissance, 284
Resist dyeing, 223
Respiration, 65
Retouching, 161, 395, 398, 400
Revolution, Russian, 276
Rhine, 400
Rhinoceros, 151, 152
Rhodesia, 25;
Rhodesian Man, 25, 26, 64, 497
Rice, 344, 372, 363, 468, 479, 485, 490
Richmond, 321
Riding gear, 387
Rime, 468
Riss, 18, 150
River Drift, 151
Roads, 380, 424
Rock shelters, 501
Rocky mountains, 202, 294, 386
Rodents, 11, 295
Roman, Rome, 77, 82, 104, 126, 129, 190, 195, 198, 209, 211,
230, 248, 250, 256, 265, 269, 273, 274, 305, 395, 419, 425,
447, 474, 499;
Empire, 204, 207, 258, 451, 463, 466
Romance, 95, 104, 121
Romanesque, 249, 250
Rostro-carinate implements, 148
Runic writing, 425
Russia, Russian, 49, 53, 95, 203, 213, 285, 398, 401, 427, 432,
462, 473-475
Rutot, 147
Rye, 415, 416

Sabæans, 287
Sabbath, 257, 258
Sacramento River, 367;
Valley, 309
Sacrifice, 469, 479, 491;
human, 341, 363, 369, 370
Safety-pin, 418, 419, 424, 427, 431-433
Sahara, 496
Sakai, 46, 486
Sakhalien, 470, 475
Salish, 120, 295, 356
Samoyed, 96, 474, 475
Sandals, 363
San Francisco Bay, 307, 320
San Joaquin River, 307
Sankhya philosophy, 480
Sanskrit, 103, 124, 126, 136, 220, 287, 289, 346, 347, 477, 479
Santa Barbara Islands, 384
Santander, 157
Saracen, 250, 419
Sardinia, 432
Sargon, 434, 435, 451, 458
Sassanian, 250, 452
Saturn, 254, 255, 258
Saul, 423
Scandinavia, Scandinavian, 43, 284, 395, 408, 427, 428, 430,
431, 432, 435, 460, 475, 505
Scapulimancy, 210, 469
Schoetensack, 21
Schweizersbild, 157, 412
Scimitar, 419
Scotch, Scots, Scotland, 28, 117, 190, 408, 412
Sculpture, 371, 396, 418, 484, 488, 491
Scythian, 459
Semang, 486
Semite, Semitic, 53, 96, 100, 103, 111, 113, 119-121, 135, 224,
268, 272, 274, 285, 286, 289, 448-454, 472, 473, 482, 484,
505
Senegal, 502
Senoi, 41, 46, 486
Sequoya, 225
Serb, 43
Shabattum, 257
Shakespeare, 115
Shansi, 464
Shaman, 303-311, 349, 363, 366, 367
Shan-Siamese, 95, 465, 485
Shantung, 464
Sheep, 210, 414, 415, 429, 441, 446, 450, 463, 473, 498
Shekel, 207
Shell Mounds, 212, 429, 434, 470
Shensi, 464, 466
Shield, 502
Shi-Hwang-ti, 5, 465
Shinra, 470
Shinto, 471, 483
Shoshonean, 135
Shoulder blade divination, see Scapulimancy
Siam, 486
Si-an-fu, 461
Sib, 232
Siberia, 53, 210, 213, 218, 222, 350, 364, 390, 398, 432, 462,
475, 476
Sicilian, Sicily, 250, 404, 432, 435, 459
Sickles, 462
Sierra Nevada, 303
Silk, 426, 465
Silver, 373, 374
Sinai, 417, 447
Sinew-backed bow, 316, 391, 503
Singapore, 68
Singhalese, 135
Sinitic, 95, 100, 485
Siouan, 100, 135, 253;
Sioux, 294
Sirgenstein, 412
Sivaism, 478
Sixty in measures, 207
Skin boat, 389, 390
Skull capacity, 21, 23, 24, 38, 39, 137
Skull cult, 478, 489, 490
Slav, Slavic, 76, 95, 111, 257
Slavery, 500
Sled, 389, 390
Smallpox, 66, 69
Smiths, 497
Smoking, see tobacco
Snails, 408
Soffit, 246
Solomon Islands, 226
Solstices, 375, 388
Solutré, 153, 157
Solutrean, 27, 29, 153, 395, 396, 400, 401, 403, 406, 411, 412,
496
Somaliland, 448
Somatology, 5
Sonant sounds, 93
Sothic year, 443
Soul, 171, 187, 349, 364, 482, 483
Sound shift, 93
Southeast area, Southern Woodland, 295, 336, 358, 360, 373,
385, 386
Southwest area, 181, 184, 190, 211, 235, 294, 296, 304, 317,
336, 340, 341, 355, 356-358, 360, 361, 369-372, 375, 384,
387, 389, 431, 459
Spanish-American, 310
Spain, Spaniards, Spanish, 69, 119, 121, 134, 203, 212, 223,
250, 251, 289, 290, 361, 384, 387, 398, 400-402, 404, 407,
408, 417-419, 432, 435, 454, 489, 496
Spanning, 242
Sparta, 129
Spear thrower, 166, 349, 390, 396, 495
Specialization, 311, 317, 354, 367
Spindle, 362
Spinning, 222
Split, 446
Spy, 24, 34
Stability of speech, 104
St. Acheul, 157, 398
Stations, 151, 157
Stature, 30, 37, 41
Steel, 422, 423, 426, 456
Stock, linguistic, see Family, linguistic
Stone Age, 141, 145, 396, 489, 496
Stone-Bronze period, 417
Stopped sounds, 92
Straits Settlements, 68
Stratification, 319, 445, 450;
stratigraphy, 319, 324
St. Sophia, 250, 251
Stucken, 201
Sudan, 39, 52, 54, 96, 497, 499, 500
Suez, 441
Sumatra, 248, 289, 486, 487, 489
Sumer, Sumerian, 113, 203, 223, 266, 268, 434, 438, 441, 442,
448, 449, 452, 453, 458, 463, 472, 506
Sun Dance, 294, 369
Sungari river, 470
Superior, Lake, 421
Supraorbital ridges, 21, 24, 29
Surd sounds, 93
Survival, 281
Susa, 449, 450
Sussex, 22
Suwanee river, 3
Swastika, 123, 333
Sweden, 428
Swine, 414, 415, 441, 450, 463, 490, 491
Swiss, Switzerland, 111, 157, 177, 412, 415, 421, 424, 431, 432
Sword, 418, 419, 432
Syllabic writing, 224, 226
Symbiosis, 412
Synthetic languages, 220
Syria, 250, 258, 270, 291, 402, 407, 440, 441, 451, 454, 496;
Syriac, 291
System, 266, 267;
systemization, 480
Szechuan, 468

Taboo, 491, 494

Tagalog, 290
Tagbanua, 290
T’ai, 95, 485, 486
Taj Mahal, 251
Talent, 207
Tamerlane, 475
Tang, 465, 468
Tano, 187
Taos, 181
Tapioca, 382
Tapuya, 100
Tardenoisian, 407
Taro, 490, 491
Tasmania, 32, 39, 45, 55, 222, 329, 495
Tatar, 473
Tectiform paintings, 170
Telegrams, 283
Tell-el-Amarna, 454
Temperature, 65
Temple, 358, 363, 368, 369, 371, 381, 385, 386, 441, 479
Tenochtitlan, 359
Teocentli, 353
Tepecano, 310
Tertiary, 18, 23, 148
Testament, Old, 210, 422, 435
Tewa, 187, 236
Texas, 236, 385
Textile patterns, 221, 223;
processes, 222
Thor, 256
Thracians, 452
Thutmose III, 447, 458
Tibet, 204, 210, 248, 290, 485
Tibeto-Burman, 95, 477, 485
Tie dyeing, 223
Tierra del Fuego, 222, 384
Tiger, 152
Tigris, 203, 448, 451, 452, 453
Time reckoning, 225
Tin, 227, 228, 373, 417, 421, 430, 431, 447, 449, 478
Tipi, 294, 340, 386, 391
Titicaca, Lake, 380
Tlingit, 117, 295, 356
Toala, 41, 46, 486
Tobacco, 211, 212, 302, 354, 467
Toda, 481
Tokyo, 69
Toloache, 310
Tomahawk pipe, 212
Tonalamatl, 376
Torres Straits, 492
Totem, 232-238, 331, 355-360, 490, 492, 493, 500, 501
Tourassian, 406
Town life, 372, 385, 386
Tradition, 239, 326
Travois, 387
Treadle shed, 222
Tribe, 232
Trinil, 21
Tropical Forest area, 338, 339, 342, 355, 361, 369, 370, 373,
378, 381, 382, 501
Trousers, 460
Troy, 418, 423, 433, 441, 451, 457, 458
Tsimshian, 295, 356
Ts’in, 465
Tübatulabal, 135
Tuberculosis, 69
Tungus, 95, 474, 475
Tunis, 404
Tupi, 100, 105, 352
Turco-Tartar, 53
Turk, Turkey, Turkish, 95, 103, 203, 287, 424, 450, 452, 453,
474, 475, 476, 484
Turkistan, 204, 287, 441, 449, 454, 455, 462, 473, 484
Turquoise, 187, 188
Twins, identical, 71
Two Rivers, 440
Typhoid, 69
Tyrrhenians, 248

Unconscious, 125-131
Ugrian, 53
Ungulates, 11, 29
Uigur, 291
Unilateral descent, 232-238, 358, 493
Ulotrichi, 54, 55
United States, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 98, 106, 107, 133, 181, 213,
268, 296, 334, 342, 358
Ural-Altaic, 96, 100, 118, 450, 453, 472, 474, 475
Uralic, 95, 432, 462, 474
Urus, see Bos primigenius
Uto-Aztecan, 121, 352