Sociology of Boredom

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Henri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom'

Michael E. Gardiner Theory Culture Society 2012 29: 37 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417460 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/29/2/37
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Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

Michael E. Gardiner
Abstract The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his critique of everyday life but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like boring or boredom in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvres writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and W alter Ben jamin. Key words affect j boredom
Lefebvre
Marxism
utopia
Theory, Culture & Society 2012 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 29(2): 37^62 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417460
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Theory, Culture & Society 29(2) On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom, and the critique of everyday life has a sociology of boredom as part of its agenda. (Lefebvre, 2002: 75)
F MANY of my academic colleagues are to be believed, boredom is a superficially fleeting and essentially psychological condition that can be dispelled easily by a brisk walk or arresting diversion. Such mild psychic disturbances can hardly be the purview of a rigorous social science concerned with altogether weightier issues, and the reassurance of dealing with such solid, measurable facts as income disparities or the rate of violent crime. One of the ironies of this attitude is that boredom has been subjected to considerable scrutiny by a wide range of writers and philosophers in the modern age, from Pascal to Kierkegaard and Heidegger, right up to contemporary figures like Agamben or Baudrillard. In the work of these thinkers, boredom looms as an ethical and existential problem of great significance (see Kuhn, 1976; Svendsen, 2005). More germane to our purposes, however, is the recent emergence of a vein of scholarly inquiry that examines boredom not as a timeless metaphysical conundrum, nor a purely psychological state often reducible to simple physiological causes, but as a diffuse affective experience that is correlated strongly with the consolidation of modernity itself, and hence the result of specific socio-historical and cultural factors. This implies that boredom is a mass phenomenon, and that it can be interpreted as a touchstone through which we can grasp wider anxieties and societal changes, especially how our lived, embodied experience of time has been transformed in the modern world (see Goodstein, 2005; Dalle Pezze and Salzani, 2008; Spacks, 1995). As important as this research has been in redirecting our gaze towards the sociological constitution of boredom, what it lacks is an awareness that if boredom is an historically contingent mood or condition, then it can be at least partly superseded, especially if we realize that boredom itself might occasionally harbour flashes of subversive insight and the seeds of transformational praxis. Even in her path-breaking Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein shies away from explicit social critique, suggesting that boredom is, ultimately, the unavoidable price we pay for living in a disenchanted and rationalized world (2005: 12). There are, however, more critical lines of thinking available to us. For example, in such texts as The Storyteller and the Convolute D section of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin asserts that the ethos of smooth, continuous progress that is held to occur in all sectors of life under modernity functions to mask a deeper homogenization and repetitive sameness that induces boredom in the modern subject. Yet, paradoxically, certain manifestations of boredom for Benjamin can also tap into collective wishimages of an emancipated humanity, and hence be understood as contributing to the interruption of the runaway juggernaut of modernity. As with work on Benjamin generally, his meditations on boredom, however scattered and inchoate they might seem, have already received
Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom
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considerable attention (see A. Benjamin, 2005; Moran, 2003; Salzani, 2009). In contrast, commentary on the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvres comparable treatment of the same topic is notable by its complete absence. This situation is, arguably, symptomatic of the relative neglect of Lefebvres ideas in Anglo-American circles until recently, at least outside certain currents of critical geography and broad historical surveys of postwar French socio-political thought. Given the relative inattention paid to Lefebvres work generally, and especially in this area, my central purpose will be to explore his embryonic sociology of boredom, and to treat it as a significant but as yet unexamined component of his overarching critique of everyday life . When referring to the everyday, Lefebvre invokes G.W.F. Hegels maxim The familiar is not necessarily the known In so doing, Lefebvre is . striving to put his finger on something that, partly by virtue of its very pervasiveness in our lives, remains one of the most trivialized and misunderstood aspects of social existence. Mysterious, yet at the same time substantial and fecund, everyday life is the crucial foundation upon which the so-called higher activities of human beings, including abstract cognition and practical objectifications, are premised. We must therefore be concerned above all with redeeming its hidden and oft-suppressed potentials (Lefebvre, 1991a: 87). Furthermore, Lefebvres approach contrasts with many phenomenological approaches in its insistence that everyday life has a specific history, one that is intimately bound up with the dynamics of modernity, and hence riven with numerous contradictions and marked by a considerable degree of ambiguity and internal complexity. For Lefebvre, everyday life, understood as an identifiable domain or attitude seemingly distinct from more specialized actions and knowledges, is a product of the modern world itself. This general orientation applies equally to his conceptualization of boredom. But although Lefebvre was keenly interested in boredom and its cognates (such as alienation, indifference or tragic melancholy), and references to it crop up frequently in his works, he did not analyse it systematically, insofar as he uses terms like boring or boredom in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such an apparent lack of precision reveals not only a deep ambivalence that Lefebvre harbours about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle and illuminating pattern of differentiation vis-a-vis particular modalities of boredom. In certain passages, Lefebvre would seem to concur with the stance taken by the Situationist International that boredom is irredeemably counter-revolutionary ^ that everyday life in the modern world is so deadened by stultifying routine, the banalization of culture and the colonization of subjectivity by the spectacle that deep and unrelenting boredom is the inevitable result, and total revolution the only cure But other manifestations are judged in a more . affirmatory way, inasmuch as they are pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, [and] unrealized possibilities (Lefebvre, 1995: 124). Indeed, in the variegated if muted subjective palette that is boredom, which is not a
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Theory, Culture & Society 29(2)
discrete and unambiguous experience but a multiplicity of moods and feelings that resist analysis (Phillips, 1993: 78), we can begin to glimpse latent connections between certain forms of boredom and utopian propensities. These conjoinings caught the attention not only of Benjamin but also Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and others (see Osborne, 2006). In the following discussion, I will begin by examining the broader conditions of modernity that have arguably given rise to the contemporary experience of boredom, drawing on some of the most recent scholarship in this area. Next, I delve into the specificities of Lefebvres understanding of the relationship between modernity and boredom, and, crucially, what he takes to be the range of possible responses to the epidemicof mass boredom in our age. Especial reference will be made here to such typically Lefebvrean concepts as the moment, the aleatory and Marxist irony It . should be emphasized that Lefebvre is a deliberately anti-systematic thinker, and there is no fully articulated theory of boredom in his writings. Accordingly, this article must be understood as a somewhat speculative exercise in conceptual reconstruction and synthesis that, hopefully, remains aligned with the spirit and substance of his overarching critical project. The conclusion will present an opportunity to conjecture as to the nature and significance of Lefebvres contribution to the emerging field of what might be termed boredom studies . Boredom and Its Discontents Literary and cultural history is 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 of course ennui, a condition briefly fashionable among the 18th-century literati (see Raposa, 1999; Toohey, 1988). Superficially, these appear to be very similar to boredom But, . although each produced distinct terminologies and images that were evoked by subsequent generations, a strong case can be made for a specifically modern form of boredom that has no direct analogue in earlier types of subjective malaise. Elizabeth Goodstein articulates this position convincingly in the aforementioned Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Her main argument is that we should not refer to subjective experiences outside the discursive contexts through which they are constituted. Particular historical conjunctures bring to the fore distinctive rhetorics of reflection, by which subjects articulate a coherent sense of selfhood and affirm their rightful place in the world. When we mention to friends or colleagues that we are bored, we are unlikely to make reference to an imbalance of the humours, a physiological cum cosmological explanation characteristic of the early modern discourse on melancholy, much less the demonically inspired religious doubts and
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confusions of acedia, which afflicted monks in the early Christian era. Furthermore, these earlier forms seemed to affect only the educated elites, or even narrow segments of them, such as the grand metaphysical tedium that troubled particular circles in the court of Louis XIV (see Lepenies, 1992: 36^46). Only the educated strata had access to the cultural and literary resources to frame such experiences hermeneutically, and give them rhetorical and conceptual coherence. For the majority of the labouring population, by contrast, traditional communal and religious ties functioned to anchor subjects in a world of shared and immanent meaning. Experiences such as melancholia or ennui certainly existed, but they were distinctly anomalous, confined to the literate classes, and linked to wellestablished religious and cosmological discourses. 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 19th century (1812 and 1864, respectively) (Dalle Pezze and Salzani, 2008: 11; Spacks, 1995: 32). Quite apart from questions of etymology, boredom in the modern period generally lacks the weighty metaphysical resonance attributed to concepts like ennui or even the German Langeweile, in spite of Kierkegaards suggestion that boredom is the root of all evil (1959: 281). Hence, boredom seems to be about emotional flatness and resigned indifference, something that grips us more or less involuntarily, without an identifiable cause, shape or object; it lacks the air of the dramatic and sentimental nostalgia for happier times typically associated with its antecedents. At least as significantly, boredom is a resolutely mass phenomenon. Writing in The Arcades Project, Benjamin noted that, beginning in France in the 1840s, Western societies were gripped by an epidemic of boredom, which he identified with the atrophy of experience characteristic of mechanized and urbanized social life (1999a: 108). It swept through all social strata, classes and professions indiscriminately. At this time, England referred to this pandemic as the French disease France (pre. sumably) retaliated by calling it the English malady, perhaps taking especial note of the widely reported case of an Englishman who committed suicide because he could not bear the tedium of dressing himself each morning. The historical emergence of boredom is made possible by two developments that followed in the wake of the twin revolutions of industrialization and the French Republic. The first is a process of cultural modernization that devalues the past, stressing instead perpetual change, innovation and transformation vis-a-vis both self and world. The second is an increasingly standardized form of social existence, which is under continuous assault from the acceleration and redeployment of temporality that is the crux of modernization. Formerly heterogeneous activities are subjected to the tyranny of a universal clock-time, and individual moments, especially under the sway of industrial labour, become repetitive, interchangeable and bereft of meaning (see Lepenies, 1992: 87^9). The instantiation of this empty, homogeneous time must also be understood in relation to the continual
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shocks of modern urban life. As Georg Simmel (1997) noted famously in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, in the modern city all the usual anchors of personal identity and meaning are swept away in a maelstrom of sensory bombardments and activities. It brought mass anonymity and the blase attitude, new distractions and leisure forms, public squares and broad avenues, theatres and cafes, but also a host of new class, regional and gender antagonisms that sharpened over the course of the century. As scientific prowess increased, there was a widespread sense that the ties that bound society together, and hitherto provided a meaningful theodicy, were collapsing. Nineteenth-century Europe was marked by the triumph of the material over the spiritual, objective over subjective, quantitative over qualitative, fuelling a sense of profound dislocation and anomie that obsessed such early sociologists as Durkheim and Tnnies. According to Goodstein, these themes were taken up in a variety of literary and cultural forms so as to constitute a distinctly modern rhetoric of reflection Max Webers disenchantment of the world, in which quotidian . elements no longer had a distinct meaning and self-evident relation to the whole, is made possible by the Enlightenments cultivation of sceptical intellectual distance, through which earlier certitudes fail to ring true after being subjected to systematic and unceasing rational investigation. Nihilism is at the heart of modern scientific rationality, because the latter grasps the world as a collection of inert facts devoid of life or intrinsic meaning, positing a universe that is profoundly indifferent to human existence. This makes possible an agnosticism with respect to crucial existential and philosophical questions that is available not only to the writer or aesthete but also the common people ^ leading ultimately to what Goodstein calls a democratized skepticism Such a mass scepticism was steeped in the . new scientific and materialist explanatory framework, which was, perhaps inevitably, applied to boredom as well. This novel rhetoric had no precursor in earlier reflections on acedia or melancholy, bound up as they were in now antiquated religious or metaphysical notions. It held up a resolutely desacralized vision of the body, an entity animated by abstract natural forces, impulses and energies. Accordingly, boredom was usually thought to be the result of nervous exhaustion or social overstimulation, often identified by the curious affliction then called neurasthenia (see Blom, 2009: 265^9), rather than a moral failing, the usual 18th-century response. Although the modern period was generally thought to have superseded both the ancient and medieval worlds, what is most ironic is that it also provided the intellectual resources to undermine its own newly wrought traditions, practices and standards. ll that is solid melts into air, as Marx A said, and this applied equally to bourgeois platitudes and the suddenly fragile epistemological certitudes that science sought to establish. Boredom, in other words, is above all an estrangement from the formerly stable moral and socio-cultural foundations of acting and thinking. But, curiously enough, because this modern rhetoric of reflection diagnosed boredom in deterministic medical or social scientific terms, its actual historical
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formation was obscured, which functioned to naturalize boredom as inescapable fate, as an epidemic or contagion that overwhelms the individual. Whereas earlier modes of thinking about spiritual or psychological distress related it to presumptive religious, moral or cultural decline, talk about boredom is couched now in a discursive form that is thoroughly materialist, secular and reconciled to the demise of transcendental meaning. In short, boredom is simultaneously a product of modernity and intrinsic to the very nature of modern existence itself, at once cause and symptom of the dilemmas, anxieties and experiences that mark the contemporary age. As Goodstein succinctly puts it, boredom is a vaguely disquieting mood that haunts the Western world[,] both as the disaffection with the old that drives the search for change and as the malaise produced by living under a permanent speedup (2005: 18). Modernity, Repetition and Commodity Time If it is correct to assume that boredom is experienced as a subjective malaise intrinsic to the social forces that constitute modernity, how does Lefebvres understanding of boredom relate to this account? I suggest it fits very well indeed. Much of his understanding of the formation and nature of modern boredom hinges on a transformation in our experience of time ^ specifically, an epochal transition from cyclical historical time to an abstract, linear form that might be termed commodity time Life in pre. modern societies, according to Lefebvre, was organized in relation to the endless, undulating cycles of birth and death, remembrance and recapitulation that mark the natural world. Daily life had a distinctly recurrent or repetitious character, but was profoundly lived and embodied collectively, in a world that (with a nod to Heidegger) we inhabit poetically as well as materially. This mode of natural repetition, together with interwoven human activities, generates constant newness within continuity. Although he rejects both cosmological Romanticism and mechanical materialism, Lefebvre is adamant that nature represents a fecundity, a fundamental power that develops cyclically. He gives the example of an ocean wave: although appearing interchangeable to the casual observer, each is subtly different, shaped in infinitesimal ways by wind, the movement of the sea, undercurrents, salinity and temperature. There are smaller rhythms within the larger ones, each big wave gives birth to tinier eddies and whorls; in some instances they are gentle, at other times immensely threatening, like the unpredictable rogue wave In examining waves closely, Lefebvre writes, we begin to . notice that there is always something unexpected, always something which seems to be a fragment but is suddenly a whole (1995: 129). Pre-modern societies established contact with these elemental forces and rhythms through innumerable festivals, rituals and celebrations. The festival disrupts the human order of praxis[,] identifying with the rhythms of the cosmos, as Lefebvre says (1995: 146). This enmeshing of natural with embodied human rhythms can be seen most directly in the exercise
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of human labour. Work in pre-modern times was understood as both a social and personal creation, a craft that involved shaping natural materials in tandem with their intrinsic physical properties, by applying practical knowledges built up over eons. In the performance of apparently identical tasks, there is always variation and novelty, however slight, and technical knowhow relies more on flexible and largely improvised rules of thumb than the rigid application of abstract and invariant principles. Labour unfolds according to intrinsic time-scales, themselves integrated into a broader, coherent style of life marked by custom, habit and ritual. The time of such non-accumulative societies is distinctive: sensual, qualitative in nature, integrated into the body, and imbued with poetic or aesthetic qualities. Under modernity, the situation is starkly different. Here, the dominant form of repetition is derived from the dictates of technology, work and production, rather than from the natural world. The economy becomes the central axis of society and the fulcrum of historical transformation, and all the diverse realms of society are subordinated to the project of capital accumulation and enhanced technological control, increasingly under the aegis of the state. Hence, we witness a shift to a purely quantitative time favouring a formal, decontextualized knowledge, and which is experienced as abstract, linear, sequential, predictable and monotonous. The time of modernity is determined by the logic of the commodity and its endless flows and homeostatic circuits, of exchange- rather than use-value. It is a time of endless nows, described by Lefebvre as a growing multiplicity of neutral, indifferent instants (2005: 85; see also Maffesoli, 1998). In the accelerated yet truncated time of modern urban life, a significant result is the loss of shared remembrance. What is crucial here is the deterioration of the role formerly played by cyclical repetition in the maintenance of social memory. In the predominantly oral culture of pre-modern times, societies developed rich symbolic systems that were connected organically to the rhythms and cycles of nature, and, through innumerable rituals and ceremonies, sustained communal memories over millennia. With the fragmentation of a formerly integrated style of life and the dominance of exchange-value, communication is increasingly mediated by electronic forms of storage, reproduction, and transmission, which for Lefebvre is the handmaiden of rational administration, surveillance and technocratic power. The multifaceted symbol is increasingly replaced by the signal, the latter of which is born with industrialization (Lefebvre, 2002: 300). Signals reduce the semantic field to a fixed image or idea, and interrupt the continuity of historical experience and collective memorialization. This creates a situation in which, as Bergson also noted, the immediate instant tends to disappear in an instant which has already passed, rather than embedded organically in the flow of perceptual and experiential duration (Lefebvre, 1995: 166). Signals call for an automatic, essentially passive response; they constitute semiotic mechanisms of compulsion. There is no need to foster collective memory and historical experience if the signal can condition individual responses more or less automatically, for the purpose
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of undertaking discrete and fragmented instrumental tasks of the sort modernity demands. Whereas the pre-modern craftsperson learns from mistakes, and builds upon, masters and ultimately revivifies techniques transmitted from past generations, the modern unskilled factory worker has access to nothing of the sort. As such, the loss of experience in modern times is more than merely aesthetic: it is social and cultural as well. Many readers will realize that this account approximates closely Benjamins discussion of oral culture and tradition in his famous 1936 essay The Storyteller Here, Benjamin suggests that storytelling in pre. modern societies was a communal yet intimate enterprise. The storytellers goal was not simply to pass the time, but to construct a coherent, meaningful narrative out of the flux of daily life, to fashion the raw material of experience, in a solid, useful, and unique way (Benjamin, 1968: 108). By this process, collective traditions and memories were cultivated and transmitted across generations. Yet, this did not occur without alteration or change: in storytelling, repetition is crucial for both continuity and transformation, inasmuch as difference emerges out of each iteration. No two tellings are the same; in every repetition, the storys central narrative is subtly embellished, digressed from and altered, not only by the storytellers, but the listeners as well. The story unfolds slowly, according to its own rhythms and cadences, its shifting moods and affective colourations. To grasp the story and its allegorical resonances properly, one has to be in an appropriately receptive frame of mind, which can only occur if we are well and truly bored, something that we have insufficient opportunity for in modern urban life. As Benjamin writes, the assimilation of narrative requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation (1968: 91). What is distinctive about modernity is that stories are no longer spun and rewoven continually in communal settings, but are presented as mere bits of information and consumed through essentially passive and solitary acts. To be hooked on the endless streams of information that allegedly constitute news, or to focus intently on every fleeting change of fashion, is for Benjamin a form of addiction. In the modern world, therefore, we are witness to the replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, [which] reflects the increasing atrophy of experience (1968: 159). We find more than an echo of this in Lefebvres suggestion that information deletes thought and reduces positive knowledge to that which is amassed, accumulated, memorized without gaps, outside of lived experience (2005: 150). The instant experienced as endless and empty repetition, as boredom, is a Sisyphean punishment characteristic of an unredeemed modernity. It undermines the assumption that the historical trajectory of modernity is one of boundless improvement and appropriately sunny optimism. The irony is that the obsession with the new in the modern world functions to mask a deeper homogenization and repetitive sameness. For Lefebvre, linearity imposes its mechanical regularity, a monotonous banality, on the
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everyday. Within this monotony, there is change of a sort, but it is programmed and predictable, like the planned obsolescence that keeps us continually lusting after new commodities, spectacles and experiences (Lefebvre, 1987: 10). To be integrated into the demands of the economic system, the human body has to be broken like a draft animal, trained to incorporate stereotypical actions and gestures into modes of bodily deployment to the point of near-automatism, or what Lefebvre calls dressage (Lefebvre and Regulier, 2004: 40). In the unfolding of natural rhythms, he argues, things are created afresh; the dawn of each successive day brings with it the promise of new starts and unforeseen discoveries. By contrast, linear repetition, as in the individual stroke of the hammer or keyboard, which can begin or stop at any time and is not immersed in a cohesive and organic temporal flow, results in lassitude, boredom and fatigue Linearity . alone is amenable to being fully quantified and homogenized . . . [and a fully] quantified social time is indifferent to day and night, to the rhythms of impulses (Lefebvre, 2005: 129, 130). As such, the dominance of commodity time means that each instant is crammed with more and more activities, distractions, visual stimuli and entertainments; but this time is also manifestly empty, because bereft of the qualitative meanings and symbols that contribute to the formation of individual and collective identities. In sum, the modern economy relies on linear scales that project a unilateral homogeneous and desacralized time, geared towards maximum accumulation, supplying the fundamental basis on which the very warp and woof of everyday life is organized (Lefebvre and Regulier, 2004: 73). Yet, Lefebvre also argues that there are limits to the technocratic structuring of the everyday. Natural rhythms cannot be entirely eliminated, and many aspects of daily life remain hidden and obscure, beyond the grasp of the fully legible Cartesian space that technocratic rationalism strives to create. The human body, for instance, retains a cryptic opacity, and does not entirely succumb to the power of abstract rational thought, preserving difference within repetition (Lefebvre, 1991b: 203). Similarly, echoes of ancient festival traditions continue to persist in the interstices and margins of contemporary urban life. Accordingly, cyclical and linear repetitions coexist in the modern age, as part of an overarching if conflictual unity. [C]yclic time scales have been ripped asunder by the linear time of the process of accumulation and have been left to hang in tatters within us and around us, writes Lefebvre. nd yet symbolisms, rhythms and the shatA tered or degenerate nucleuses continue to organize the everyday (2002: 336). This is why the everyday cannot be defined by repetition alone; rather, it is the place where sameness and creativity meet and interact. Music provides us with a good example: it is traversed by both the linear (beat) and cyclical (melody and harmony), both of which are necessary for musical production. Accordingly, we need to realize that there are different modalities of the repetitive in the modern world. However degraded, trivialized and quantified, the enduring character of the everyday ^ its desires,
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labours, pleasures ^ represents a set of unsurpassable values for Lefebvre, and its potentialities demand realization in the here and now (1984: 14). The Politics of Boredom For Lefebvre, the banalization of life under modernity is epitomized by the suburban blandness of the post-war new towns, where city planners and bureaucrats have constructed machines for living that deprive life of all spontaneity, depth and passion. Here, we seem to be poised to enter a world of unredeemable boredom (Lefebvre, 1995: 119) ^ yet we might also be on the brink of something altogether different. The task that lies before us, as part of the general revitalization of everyday life, is a restoration of the shared experience of lived temporality, wherein emotions, feelings and subjectivity would be reaffirmed, along with rhythm, body movements, the life of the flesh (Lefebvre, 1995: 263). In contemplating the battle over the imposition of compulsive time, Lefebvre envisages a number of different responses vis-a-vis boredom, ranging from the distractions of consumerism, the cultivation of a quasi-aristocratic ennui, various mysticisms and philosophical irrationalisms, the aesthetic provocations of the Surrealists, all the way to such moments as the Paris Commune or the near-revolution of May 1968 in France. Discussing such varied reactions will help us to understand why Lefebvre believes that whereas some modalities of boredom can be understood as a passive resignation to the status quo, or defensive responses to the shocks and dislocations of modernity, others might harbour kernels of critical insight and praxis. For, in his inimitably dialectical way, Lefebvre always reminds us that, even in the most apparently trivial or degraded of human experiences, there reside latently emancipatory possibilities. Given the deterioration of creative work under capitalism, and the emergence of a privatized consciousness, it is understandable that many individuals seek escape from the monotony and dreariness of daily life in leisure pursuits. Yet, Lefebvre is adamant that leisure cannot be separated arbitrarily from other spheres of social life, especially work: So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure only has one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious circle (Lefebvre, 1991a: 40). As both Hegel and Marx pointed out, necessity does not disappear in the realm of freedom. Indeed, Lefebvre argues that the commodification of leisure activities is an essential component of the shift from production to consumption in post-war capitalism. Modernity creates specific (though debased) needs, that can only be satisfied through the accumulation of commodified objects, images and experiences. The visions and fantasies projected in advertising offer a mere simulation of non-alienated pleasure and fulfilment, thereby replacing real unhappiness by fictions of happiness (Lefebvre, 1991a: 35). And, as he notes in the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, although real physical drudgery might be largely absent from domestic or other tasks in the Western world today, because of labour-saving devices and
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cyberneticization, this hardly solves the problem of modern work. Although the middle and upper classes took to intensified leisure pursuits and the accumulation of sensations as an escape from the routinization of modern life as early as the 19th century, indulging in detective fiction, travel or collecting, the time of leisure and that of the machine remains effectively the same. This explains Lefebvres pithy suggestion that to get bored you need leisure (1995: 353). As Lars Svendsen notes in A Philosophy of Boredom (2005: 61), modernity valorizes the notion of self-actualization, in which every element of life and experience must have personal value, implying in turn that life itself must always be interesting (It is certainly worth noting that the . words boredom and interesting came into being historically at roughly the same time.) For Svendsen, the existential burden to always be interesting, and to continually find things of interest, is an often insurmountable task, leaving us frustrated and ultimately bored. This chimes with Lefebvres argument that the cult of the interesting ^ the sensational, the important, the unusual, the amusing, the absorbing ^ is linked to the hyper-stimulation of modern culture, which, because it quickly reaches a saturation point, is merely the flip-side of boredom. Modern boredom raises the problem of style in life ^ which must be delineated sharply from the mere adoption of commodified lifestyles (Lefebvre, 1995: 278, 353). According to Lefebvre, consumer activities per se do not allow natural cycles into the mix, or cater to genuine creativity and embodied engagement, and hence fail to produce authentically maximal difference (so-called because it retains transformative potential, unlike minimal differences, which are merely symbolic contrasts that can be easily co-opted by the culture industry). In mechanical repetition, the hallmark of modern labour, all that can be produced is isolated things or objects with quantifiable exchange-values, but not what Lefebvre calls oeuvres. By the oeuvre, he means the creation of artworks, philosophy or even entire cities, along with their attendant use-values, through the free (and indeed playful) appropriation of space and time, which is starkly opposed to the purely technical mastery of material nature which produces products and exchange values (1996: 175^6). What we have lost is the capacity for properly aesthetic experience, understood in the original Greek sense of aisthesis, a shared corporeal disclosure of the sensible world through which notions of meaning and value are formulated. The life-long process of cultivating particular tastes and knowledges through a process of finely honed discernment and the continuous education of desire has been replaced by the ever-accelerating yet essentially passive accumulation of images and entertainments. In this endless search for novelty and the constant hyper-stimulation that results, we inhabit an ambient psychological state that is marked by innumerable lightning transitions from interest to tedium (Lefebvre, 1995: 165^6). What is fleetingly fashionable is, in reality, the deceptive outer shell of an eternal sameness. Lefebvre identifies the connection between stimulation and boredom
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as one of the hidden dialectical movements of modernity: what we identify as interesting, he says, is a short-lived phenomenon. It is quickly exhausted. The interesting becomes boring (1995: 260; see also Anderson, 2004). The manic search for novelty that accompanies untrammelled consumerism is undoubtedly one of the most common responses to mass boredom for Lefebvre, but hardly the only noteworthy one. Although suggestions that entire nations are sinking into a boredom at zero point might smack of hyperbole, Lefebvre is arguably correct to say that boredom has now reached a state of such intimate familiarity that we often fail to recognize that we are bored (1984: 186; see also Svendsen, 2005: 14). In other words, we are seemingly comfortable with being bored, in which case it might be said to function as a kind of protective psychic layer, like Simmels blase atti tude, or Benjamins striking image of boredom as a warm grey cloth that envelops and benumbs us. This can insulate us from some of the brutalities and uncertainties of the modern world, but at the cost of refusing the existential onus of commitment, passion and engagement. Alternatively, we find ways of accepting the apparently permanent character of boredom, and cope with it accordingly. In a fascinating (if highly compressed) discussion, Lefebvre suggests that what he calls (oddly) nglo-Saxon humour might A well be a way to contend with the mundane triviality that typically marks the modern everyday, because it softens the coarse unpleasantness and palpable unfairness that most people experience in their day-to-day lives. Humour provides, if not exactly adventure, romance or transcendence, a quiet reassurance that things could be worse, a kind of Dunkirk spirit for the soul, which might be the last refuge of what he calls, disparagingly, po-faced decency (Lefebvre, 1995: 35). Recourse to such humour seemingly resolves the contradictions and indignities of everyday life, but in a temporary or illusory way, and hence can only be palliative. Another, apparently more Gallic response, not available to the more prosaically minded Anglophone denizens of the modern world (or so it would seem, since Lefebvres tongue might be firmly planted in cheek here), would be to savour boredom ^ or, to be more precise, ennui ^ as something akin to the leisurely sipping of a fine wine. What Lefebvre terms the French road to ennui implies a quasi-aristocratic cultivation of world-weariness and cynical detachment, one imbued with considerable nostalgia for what Bertolt Brecht once called the bad old days The person in . the grip of ennui struggles against the [modern] boredom of an absence of style [by] trying to turn the clock back, exhuming old styles, myths and symbols from a pre-capitalist past But this sort of response is equally a . dead-end, inasmuch as it represents the boredom of youth without a future [W]ill you be content simply to pick your ironic and philosophical . way through all these boredoms?, Lefebvre asks rhetorically. Or perhaps to invent a new one, just right for the occasion, the exquisite boredom of the never-ending dinner party with its overpolite host, the boredom of shattered pride, tinged with the subtle hues of intellectuality? (1995: 92, 124^5).
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Such overly intellectualized responses to the subjective malaise of modernity is exemplified by what Lefebvre considers to be the ill-considered nihilism of the existentialist, which for him is symptomatic of a privatized, petty-bourgeois individualism that never gets beyond a narcissistic and somewhat juvenile expression of despair. It is worth noting that Lefebvre expressly rejects the idea of Alltglichkeit as espoused by Heidegger and the early Luka cs, inasmuch as they tend to regard the everyday as the natural domain of the anonymous masses, with their middling thoughts and inconsequential actions, wherein the mundanity of daily life can only be transcended philosophically by a heroically enlightened few. This stance is, for Lefebvre, unnecessarily pessimistic and profoundly antidemocratic: existentialism dispossesses mundane, everyday existence, annulling it, denying it. It is the very thing which denies life: it is the nothingness of anguish, of vertigo, of fascination (1991a: 125). A good example of this line of thinking is Heideggers notion of profound or authentic boredom. Boredom for Heidegger is not the result of any sort of objective causality, but rather a fundamental mood or region of experience Whereas the anon. ymous person in the street is prone to ordinary boredom, more elevated forms gradually reveal to the cognoscenti a connection between everydayness and inauthenticity, paving the way for an attunement with the primordial character of Being (see Heidegger, 1995: 74^175, 1998: 87). As Goodstein points out, although Heidegger developed a finely observed phenomenological account of the lived experience of boredom, it remains abstract and overly philosophical, and functions ultimately to reinscribe the elitist distinction between the mundane boredom of everyday existence and the deep boredom that leads to metaphysical questions (2005: 283). Although strongly influenced by certain aspects of Heideggers thought (see Elden, 2004), Lefebvre would likely concur with Goodstein. He believes that the boredom of an alienated everyday life can be largely (though not completely) overcome, but only through the concerted exercise of a transformative praxis imbued with a popular collective will. For Lefebvre, the everyday is not inherently authentic or inauthentic; rather, it is the fundamental terrain on which broader human feelings, pleasures and intentions are realized and subject to a process of (necessarily incomplete) authentication Such attitudes as nostalgia, nihilism or cynicism are . for Lefebvre symptoms of the belief that the everyday is an unalterable given, that there are no utopian alternatives to the present organization of society, and that humanitys youth lies in the past, not the future. Not surprisingly, he accepts none of these premises as valid: When the world the sun shines on is always new, how could everyday life [seem] forever unchangeable, unchangeable in its boredom, its greyness, its repetition of the same actions? (Lefebvre, 1991a: 228). Lefebvre similarly rejects what he calls aestheticism as a solution to the problem of boredom. Aestheticism, by his reckoning, understands art as a privileged activity detached from the everyday, an attitude which cannot protect one from boredom, but merely obscure or sublimate it.
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Here, Lefebvre is thinking of art as a specialized practice, and the bourgeois ethos of art for arts sake, which for him is a side-effect of fragmented and alienated labour, and can only provide the illusion of a genuine style of life. Only in rejecting aestheticism can we fully embrace art as an authentic model for living ^ that is, fulfil art by superseding it, and by integrating it into the fabric of a revivified everyday life (see Leger, 2006). Beautiful lan guage, artistic style and aestheticism are merely the end-products of an alienation, the alienation of the logos, and the artist has become the high priest of the logos, its magus, or simply its mandarin (Lefebvre, 1995: 176). This explains why Lefebvre does not regard Surrealism as a viable critique of everyday life. Although he was attracted initially to this movement, and attended meetings of the so-called Bureau of Surrealist Inquiries in the 1920s, Lefebvre eventually concluded that Surrealism cultivated the bizarre and the marvellous as ends in themselves, and hence did not break decisively enough from what Benjamin called the phantasmagoria of the commodity. Surrealisms attack on bourgeois life remained abstract and mystified, and, by restricting itself to the aesthetic plane, represented an ersatz bohemianism that offered no real threat to the established order (Lefebvre, 1991a: 123). All these adaptations and responses to boredom fall short for Lefebvre because they do not envisage going beyond the privatized life experience that is typical of, though by no means restricted to, the educated middle classes of the Western metropole. Yet, even in the most confused and alienated consciousness, there are moments of genuine insight. In the realm of the modern everyday, the default position might well be that of monotony and banality. For instance, most conversations, says Lefebvre, are concerned with such neutral topics as the weather, neighbours or friends. Although such dialogues are generally uninteresting and repetitive, they do signify a desire to exchange something other than mere things (2002: 313). However, the apparently trivial can shift without warning into topics of real interest, replete with deeper significances. Here, speech becomes savage, slips through the bonds of hidebound rules and regulations, spraypaints itself on the walls of our cities. Our words are then suddenly oversaturated with meaning, on the cusp of great truths and poetic insights. At such moments, we experience intense risk, in passion and poetry, [where] daily life shatters, and something different comes through with the work, whether act, speech or object (Lefebvre, 2005: 95). We would like to continue, to explore further this sudden richness that might pull us out of the banality of self-absorption and the greyness of the everyday, but we typically lack the resources to carry this desire forward. The central point here is that, for Lefebvre, daily life is simultaneously humble and sordid and rich in potential; it is the space-time of voluntary programmed self-regulation, but also utopian possibility. Despite all the attacks it is subjected to, the everyday remains the locus of all real creativity, the alpha and omega of what it means to be human. There is a power concealed in everyday lifes apparent banality, a depth beyond its
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triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness (Lefebvre, 1984: 72, 37). In the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre suggests that there are different levels or layers of awareness when it comes to our understanding of the ambiguous textures of everyday life, and that we respond to its admixture of deprivations, boredoms and possibilities in correspondingly divergent ways. He suggests a subtle but detectable movement in consciousness from sheer complacency and resignation, through nagging but still mystified discomforts and questions, to non-adaption, of vague rejections and unrecognized voids, of hesitations and misunderstandings . In the half-dreams and little everyday miracles of the latter, there are glimmerings of alternative ways of living and being (Lefebvre, 2002: 59, 60). Such reveries are seemingly private and hidden, yet at the same time open potentially to wider historical and social forces, and hence pregnant with other possibilities. These are threshold moments, and can be likened to Benjamins dream-bird of boredom that hatches the egg of experience (Benjamin, 1968: 91). The Aleatory and the Utopian Moment This complex mixture of ambiguity, obfuscation and insight that marks our everyday consciousness brings us to a fuller consideration of those interruptions of empty, homogeneous time that are replete with other, possibly utopian resonances. In the course of his discussion of the new town mentioned earlier, Lefebvre contrasts the noisy but dull repetitiveness of modern boredom, marked by a time that is simultaneously full in a quantitative sense and bereft of meaning, with another, older form. In the latter, there was a certain languidness, a luxurious stretching out of temporal experience, in which stories could be told, wine or coffee sipped and savoured, games played and pastimes indulged in, and unhurried conversations held. The new town is certainly the epitome of modern boredom, but in earlier times there existed a different kind of boredom, one that might shade into experiences of genuine leisure or idleness (see Barthes, 1985). This older form of boredom, writes Lefebvre:
had something soft and cosy about it, like Sundays with the family, comforting and carefree. There was always something to talk about, always something to do. Life was lived in slow motion, life was lived there. Now it is just boring, the pure essence of boredom. (1995: 118)
In The Storyteller, as mentioned, Benjamin argues that narratives can neither be told nor assimilated properly through relaxed and ancestral repetition if we are not in the appropriate state of mental relaxation, of a sort the boredom found typically in pre-capitalist societies made possible. This is starkly opposed to the manic, enervated boredom of the modern world, and the somnambulistic mode of distraction that accompanies it. But the attenuation of experience in the contemporary age has meant a
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precipitous decline in the art of waiting, and the result is often impotent frustration, anger and impatience (see Schweitzer, 2008). As Benjamin reminds us, we are bored in a good way when we are waiting, but we dont know precisely what for, a mode of interruption that changes the very nature of temporal experience itself. Rather than strive to kill time, we should invite it in, convert it into charged expectation of a sort that can reveal genuinely new horizons and challenges, where the future reaches into the present, touches it, and saturates it with otherness. Hence, a certain kind of boredom is important for both Benjamin and Lefebvre, because it represents what the former calls (in The Arcades Project) a Trojan horse, by which a gradual mode of awakening can stealthily enter our commodified dreamworld and transform it into dialectical possibility. Lefebvre directly addresses the question of how the vague dissatisfactions we usually associate with boredom can elide into other, more transformational instances, so that we can better understand our human propensities for passionate engagement, play and the ludic (such as in the festival), the pleasurable and the aesthetic. To illustrate this, he draws on an argument made by information theorists that the production of new meaning is balanced between sheer repetition and chaotic randomness. What Lefebvre calls the pleonasm ^ the pointless repetition of signs that is easily understood, but which generates no new insight ^ is clearly one gateway to boredom for him. But a situation that presents a set of possibilities that are so completely open and unstructured as to render unfathomable the link to concrete praxis tends to induce a fatalistic, debilitating melancholy which is, in effect, another type of boredom. Between these two extremes lies a range of potentialities that are neither completely openended nor wholly determined, and this is what Lefebvre calls the aleatory. The concept of the aleatory draws implicitly on Marxs famous passage from the 18th Brumaire, which supposes that human action is neither rooted in absolute contingency, disconnected from socio-historical factors, nor rigidly and blindly determined. Rather, it represents a dialectical unity linking necessity and chance, where chance expresses a necessity and necessity expresses itself via a network of chances (Lefebvre, 1995: 203). Just as there is no hidden hand of the marketplace (and goodness knows what the other hand is up to), for Lefebvre there is no Hegelian cunning of history . A knowledge of the aleatory prevents overcaution and hesitation, and hence can enhance transformative potentialities, but also alerts us to dangers of hubris and the ever-present possibility of failure. Hence, boredom and indifference can only be avoided if we see the present as laden with real possibilities for different ways of living, but not wholly unrealistic aspirations that can never be achieved. As Lefebvre writes: Between the world which is chock-a-block full of realism and positivism, and the gaping world of pure negativity and nihilism, our aim is to discover the open world, the world of what is possible (2002: 263). There is, for Lefebvre, no sudden and definitive leap from the realm of necessity into freedom, nor any possibility of complete dis-alienation.
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Nonetheless, there are times when tangible prospects for thorough-going social transformation hove vividly into view. This is what Lefebvre calls the moment, a flash of insight into the range of historical possibilities that are embedded in the totality of being, but that cannot be disentangled from the activities of everyday life. These are manifestations of what could be termed everyday utopianism (see Gardiner, 1995, 2004). The moment generates a tragic consciousness because most of these potentials will remain tantalizingly unfulfilled or only partially realized, although such failures are never complete or for all time. The theory of moments, Lefebvre writes, may permit us to illuminate the slow stages by which need becomes desire, deep below everyday life, and on its surface. [They may] resolve the age-old conflict between the everyday and tragedy, and between triviality and Festival (2002: 358). For all his ambivalence regarding modernity, Lefebvre acknowledges that the idea of somehow returning to the pre-modern communities of the past can only lead to the cul-de-sac of reactionary, even fascist politics. Although he has often been accused of romanticizing pre-modern forms of social life, and of viewing the contemporary everyday as irredeemably shallow and corrupted, a careful reading of the widest possible range of his texts reveals a much more nuanced and defensible position (see Gardiner, 2004). Lefebvre occasionally evinces a certain nostalgia for pre-capitalist communities, and their richly complex and fully integrated styles of life . Yet, he is equally cognizant that, although we can learn from the past and strive to realize its promises at an unspecifiable future time, we are compelled to work with the tools the modern world hands us, even if we might be desperately at odds with the manner in which it is currently constituted. He borrows freely from the Romantic tradition, affirming it as the fundamental ground base of both individual rebellion and social transformation, but Lefebvre is equally wary of the debilitating nostalgia of much Romanticism, with its mix of fatalism, ennui and quixotic desire to restore an irretrievably bygone state of affairs. We may well continue to have our (legitimately) wistful regrets and longings with respect to the world we have lost, but Lefebvre believes ultimately that what is needed today is a new or revolutionary Romanticism, one that is oriented expressly towards the future (see Lwy and Sayre, 2001: 221^5). The key, then, is to grasp and nurture the transformative possibilities that inhere in modernity, but without succumbing to a naive progressivism. For Lefebvre, such a project entails the cultivation of a profound sense of irony, albeit of a specific type. Although irony has existed since time immemorial, in modern times it is the purview of all, not only of the educated and leisured classes; we live, as Goodstein reminds us, in an era of mass or democratized scepticism. Maieutic, the technique of Socratic doubt and questioning, and the main vehicle of irony, has become generalized: Now [irony] belongs to everyone: writers, artists, architects, political activists, the masses, the classes (Lefebvre, 1995: 15). To make choices in a world of risk and uncertainty, to embrace this or that, requires a distancing,
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a standing back and cool-headed appraisal, of a sort that irony makes possible. Irony is invaluable here because it exposes the field of possibilities in the modern world, of their multiplicity, of the necessity of opting and the risk every option involves (Lefebvre, 1995: 3). As such, it is linked strongly to the aleatory. It is an ironical consciousness that allows us to prise open the gap between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome, and is hence the resolute enemy of dissembling, fatuous self-regard and pomposity, unquestioned dogmatism and naively facile optimism. The early Romantics might have mastered the use of irony in the modern era, but because it never leaves the hermeticism of a self-referential subjectivity Romanticism eschews an understanding of the underlying socio-economic transformations that are necessary to correct the real sources of subjective malaise (Lefebvre, 1995: 18). As such, Romanticism is vulnerable to pathological forms of obsessive introspection, of which boredom is one symptom, and that can easily lead to the sort of existential dread and anxiety that Sartre and others philosophized about. Benjamin, incidentally, came to the same conclusion: Romanticism ends in a theory of boredom, the characteristically modern sentiment (1999b: 110). For Lefebvre, however, the perpetuum mobile of such an insular subjectivity is not an inevitable consequence of a modern selfhood grounded in scepticism and critical reflection. Yet, we can only break out of this quietistic egocentricity through the cultivation of a Marxist irony, one that affirms the absolute reality of the pre-existing physical world, and that views consciousness itself as an irreducibly social phenomenon. This form of irony encourages us to intervene in the world, change situations, develop specific objects and aims with respect to either action or knowledge, but remains cognizant of the arcane and sometimes mysterious movement of the dialectic. The alternative to what Lefebvre refers to as the boredomof dogmatic Marxism is, therefore, a critical (and self-critical) Marxist thought that cleaves neither to an unmoored Romantic subjectivism or the brutal necessitarianism of Hegelian logic and other determinisms. Official Marxisms were fatally compromised because they were incapable of grasping the inescapably tragic dimension of human life, and the perennial gap between is and ought, such as the Stalinist predilection for a new Communist man of robust good cheer, oodles of decency and deadpan earnestness. For Lefebvre, what is just as lamentable as the cynical cafe existentialist is the good person, whether bourgeois or worker, who harbours no trace of subjective depth or ironical awareness. The festival of the decent fellow has become a meaningless profession of faith in a relentlessly facile optimism and stick-to-itiveness, a watchword for banality and boredom, of which the current glut of self-help books and aspirations to blissful if effortless and cost-free happiness might be considered emblematic (Lefebvre, 1995: 34). Marxist irony clears the air of such mystifications and ideological deadends because it recognizes that in every situation there is an element of give, of play and openness, but also shuns the cult of pure spontaneism.
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It makes judgements and choices, but equally respects the aleatory, and knows that failure is always a possible outcome; it affirms the ineluctably tragic nature of existence, but without succumbing to a self-absorbed melancholia. In short, Marxist irony can help us to resist the corrosive cynicism, indifference and boredom that infects the modern world. Lefebvre acknowledges that certain critics will attack this emphasis on irony as a form of subjectivistic idealism. To sidestep this, he distinguishes between idealist versus concrete forms of utopianism, the latter of which is strongly linked to irony. The Socratic metaphor of philosophy as midwife, of easing the pains by which a new world and novel ways of thinking are brought into being, has an undeniably utopian resonance. As he says, the maieutic of modernity is not without a certain utopianism (1995: 45, italics in original). Nor is this sort of utopianism to be confused with the pseudoutopia of the perfect state ruled by beneficent reason. bsolute determinA isms of all stripes have to be cast aside; or, put differently, we need to embrace utopianism, understood as a mode of imagining that desires and perpetually reaches out for a different and better life, but in the full knowledge that perfection or completion is endlessly deferred, and thankfully so. This is opposed resolutely to any given and necessarily static vision of utopia, which is a form of conceptual and methodological closure that can be positively dangerous, when it is not merely facile or obsolete (see Jacoby, 2005). In Lefebvres new utopianism, the imagination is becoming a lived experience, something experimental; instead of combating or repressing rationality, it is incorporating it. Only a kind of reasoned but dialectical use of utopianism will permit us to illuminate the present in the name of the future (Lefebvre, 1995: 357).
Conclusion If lively discussions with my students over the past several years are any indication, perhaps an effective way to dispel boredom is simply to talk about it ^ even in academic settings that, as Amir Baghdadchi (2005) has observed, are capable of generating a unique form of boredom. (Doubtless, every professor secretly fears the appearance of the dreaded word boring on anonymous student evaluations.) In The Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendson notes similarly that although his pupils are often perplexed when it comes to comprehending such previously well-known philosophical ideas as anxiety, judging them to be remote and arcane concerns, students today recognize instantly the experience of boredom, which exercises a peculiar fascination for them. According to Svendson, this is indicative of a profound socio-cultural shift in Western societies, wherein boredom has become our affectual base-line, a kind of default setting of mood that is so familiar to us ^ again, the cosy embrace of Benjamins warm, grey cloth ^ that we need to be jolted out of a routinized state of boredom to be able to recognize it as such. Because in modernity there is no substantial distinction between
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the significant and the insignificant, writes Svendsen, everything becomes equally interesting and as a result equally boring (2005: 61). That this topic is widely considered to be anything but boring might also be evinced in a rapidly growing body of scholarly literature, a good example being the recent collection Essays on Boredom and Modernity, edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (2008). My sense is that although Lefebvres ideas on this score can be seen to dovetail thematically, and to a certain extent methodologically with many aspects of this emerging sub-field of boredom studies, in other respects he remains an unsettling and perhaps unrecuperable presence. In the concluding remarks that follow, I propose to explore why this is arguably the case, through a brief consideration of Harvie Fergusons 2009 book Self-Identity and Everyday Life, which contains a discussion of boredom. It is hoped that this exercise will clarify the nature and potential of Lefebvres contribution to the current debate over this issue. Fergusons analysis in Self-Identity and Everyday Life grows out of his earlier study of Kierkegaards critique of modernity, the latter touching on boredom only in passing, focusing instead on the related (but not identical) phenomenon of melancholia (Ferguson, 1995). Although part of Routledges The New Sociology series, each title of which contains the phrase everyday life, Fergusons more recent book is distinctive because he does not treat the everyday as an unproblematic backdrop against which theoretical discussions of the body or globalization are foregrounded. Rather, his explicit goal is to treat the everyday critically and as a substantive topic in its own right, to tease out its genealogies, mutations and correlative effects in the context of late modernity. Yet, although the everyday has lately come to be established as a key concept vis-a-vis our understanding of the social world, Fergusons central argument is that it cannot be grasped as a clearly identifiable set of practices, attitudinal dispositions or forms of consciousness. This is because everyday life is something of an anti-concept: it is an ill-defined region of raw, fragmentary and essentially unmediated experience into which all concepts dissolve (Ferguson, 2009: 34). Such an inchoate and non-identical domain can only be approached apophatically, a stance reminiscent of Lefebvres suggestion that the everyday is that largely invisible residue remaining after other, more specialized activities have been singled out and accounted for (1991a: 85, also 2002: 64). The everyday, insofar as it can be described at all, is for Ferguson the unbounded, obscure and mundane background from which identities arise and in relation to which the self-synthesis of experience is formed (2009: 39). However, the formation of self-identity in the daily regime of contemporary societies has been rendered problematic, not least because the formerly stable linkages between selfhood, identity and the everyday are becoming increasingly fractured ^ indeed, they are now at best seen as unrelated, or even antagonistic, processes (2009: 8). The notion that society constitutes the site where all the myriad particularities of daily life are sutured together to form coherent and stable structures and patterns of action is one that
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has to be abandoned; such a received concept of the social has, in this sense, become the proverbial emperor with no clothes (see also Bauman, 2005: 374). Since there is no overarching cohesiveness vis-a-vis social life today, the synthetic unity of the subjects experience unravels. The socalled postmodern turn merely reflects a heightened awareness of such perpetual flux and dislocation. This insight leads Ferguson to a relatively sustained consideration of boredom, which, pace Goodstein et al., he views as an archetypally modern experience ^ it is, as Benjamin also noted, the everyday made manifest. In such a world, daily life becomes a here and now of banal and mundane activities (shopping, commuting and so forth) which, although occasionally punctuated by more unusual or unexpected events, is marked above all by a succession of hazy and largely indefinable moods Indeed, the constant processing and modula. tion of these free floating moods, of a sort unanchored in particular contexts or activities, is the contemporary everyday for Ferguson. As such, the modern, Romantic project of self-actualization surrenders to the nonidentical, which finds its generic form in boredom (Ferguson, 2009: 168). Evoking the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, Ferguson suggests that in the general indifference of boredom, we find what is perhaps the last realm of inclusive experience left to us, a null point of radical equality that, paradoxically, does contain certain potentialities. Boredom, he concludes, is the truth of modern life (2009: 171). Towards the end of his exposition, Ferguson hints that the nihility of boredom constitutes something of a blank slate from which new movements and surpassings can spring forth, opening up a hitherto obscured wonderland of ontological playfulness Yet, from within the parameters . of his account, it is difficult to envisage such a possibility. Part of the reason for this is that such moods as boredom are, for Ferguson, floating, decontextualized, and indefinite states of being (2009: 168), and are hence wholly detached from material or socio-historical conditions. In the third volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre appears to make a similar point when he states that conventional social science cannot easily comprehend or analyse boredom, because the latter is an ambiguous and shifting affective state that does not conform easily to the received notion of social facts ^ which, ironically, has not stopped legions of psychologists, criminologists and sociologists from trying to quantify and measure boredom (see Klapp, 1986). Despite its seemingly nebulous and changeable quality, however, what is valuable about Lefebvres approach to boredom is that he does not confine the experience of boredom to the phenomenological level. Although it might seem to be a wholly ineffable and hence incommunicable experience, boredom for Lefebvre is symptomatic of deeper social currents that can be uncovered and grasped theoretically. Although Ferguson might be correct in assuming that the contemporary social world is marked by experiential flux, indeterminacy and fragmentation, Lefebvre would argue that, alongside such dispersions and polycentralities, there are equally strong tendencies
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towards integration, homogenization and the consolidation of hierarchies, due to the relentless global logic of capital accumulation, which imparts a certain uniformity to social experience. The latter would include the application of bureaucratic reason to all of time/space (clock time, global transportation and telecommunications systems, market research and polling data, linearly repetitive tasks, universal application of positive knowledge, domination of the abstract through generalized exchange and so on), as well as the creation of innumerable stratifications and hierarchies with respect to knowledges, techniques and functions (Lefebvre, 2005: 85^8). None of these factors are in any way incompatible with the ascendance of neoliberalism. In the maelstrom of such antagonistic forces, however, Lefebvre believes that there remain distinct possibilities for the realization of genuine forms of sociability marked by unity in difference, the enhancement of individual and collective agency, and the enrichment of radical democracy, although these can only occur through dialectical oppositions and conflicts that can never be prefigured in advance. In every corner of Western society, Lefebvre argues, people are desperately seeking satisfaction and the avoidance of boredom, through a wide array of adaptations, self-help techniques and sincere (if largely ineffectual) resistances. In the main, these fail because they do not go beyond the confines of our privatized and commodified life experience. They are by turns palliative, accommodating or frustrated, evincing only a partial and mystified understanding of how the economic system induces the homogenization and quantification of space and time, developments about which Ferguson has very little to say. In seeking to prise open the crack for freedom to slip through, Lefebvre argues that we need to analyse boredom by recourse to a critical dialectical method (1995: 124). This is hardly straightforward: his ambivalence about boredom manifests itself in a wide range of intellectual responses to it across a number of different texts. But his writings do convey the possibility of a successful working through of boredom, so as to arrive at higher states of awareness and a better understanding of the link to a potentially transformative praxis, which would require a more proficient grasp of the aleatory, as filtered through a healthy dose of Marxist irony. This avenue might prove to be a more tangible and effective prophylactic against modern forms of boredom than Fergusons call for ontological playfulness ^ or at least a rejigging of boredoms default position, if hardly an outright cure, as if such a thing were possible. Lefebvre is enough of a Marxist, albeit a distinctly heretical one, to suppose that many human problems are not eternal aspects of the human condition, but historically contingent ones that have their (at least partial) solution in practice rather than endless philosophical hand-wringing, or the pervasive distractions of aestheticism, consumption or mysticism. This stance seems to be at the heart of his concrete utopianism And perhaps it is here that we . might witness a renewed emphasis on the pleasures and desires of the body, or even the resurrection of the genuine festival ^ in short, a revivification of the overarching totality that constitutes everyday life itself, of a
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kind glimpsed only furtively in such moments as the Paris Commune or May 68. Ultimately, for Lefebvre, it is a matter of:
a slow but profound modification of the everyday ^ of a new usage of the body, of time and space, of sociability; something that implies a social and political project; more enhanced forms of democracy, such as direct democracy in cities; definitions of a new citizenship ^ decentralization; participatory self-management (autogestion); and so on ^ that is, a project for society that is at the same time cultural, social, and political. Is this utopian? Yes, because utopian thought concerns what is and is not possible. All thinking that has to do with action has a utopian element. Ideals that stimulate action, such as liberty and happiness, must contain a utopian element. This is not a refutation of such ideals; it is, rather, a necessary condition of the project of changing life. (1988: 86^7)
References Anderson, B. (2004) Time-stilled Space-slowed: How Boredom Matters, Geoforum 35: 739^54. Baghdadchi, A. (2005) On Academic Boredom, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 4(3): 319^24. Barthes, R. (1985) Dare to be Lazy, pp. 338^45 in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962^1980. New York: Hill and Wang. Bauman, Z. (2005) Durkheims Society Revisited, pp. 360^82 in J.C. Alexander and P. Smith (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, A. (2005) Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity, pp. 156^70 in A. Benjamin (ed.) Walter Benjamin and History. London: Continuum. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, W. (1999a) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Benjamin, W. (1999b) Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1: 1927^1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blom, P. (2009) The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900^1914. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Dalle Pezze, B. and C. Salzani (2008) Introduction ^ The Delicate Monster: Modernity and Boredom, pp. 5^34 in B. Dalle Pezze and C. Salzani (eds) Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Elden, S. (2004) Between Marx and Heidegger: Politics, Philosophy and Lefebvres, The Production of Space, Antipode 36: 86^105. Ferguson, H. (1995) Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Sren Kierkegaards Religious Psychology. London: Routledge. Ferguson, H. (2009) Self-Identity and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Gardiner, M. (1995) Utopia and Everyday Life in French Social Thought, Utopian Studies 6(2): 90^123.
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Gardiner, M.E. (2004) Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics, Cultural Studies 18(2^3): 228^54. Goodstein, E.S. (2005) Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1998) What Is Metaphysics?, pp. 82^96 in Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacoby, R. (2005) Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought in an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1959) The Rotation Method, pp. 281^96 in Either/Or, Vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Klapp, O. (1986) Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society. New York: Greenwood Press. Kuhn, R. (1976) The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Lefebvre, H. (1987) The Everyday and Everydayness, Yale French Studies 73: 7^11. Lefebvre, H. (1988) Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marxs Death, pp. 75^88 in L. Grossberg and C. Nelson (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991a) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1. London and New York: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (1991b) The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (1995) Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959^ May 1961. London: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (1996) Writings on Cities. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2002) Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London: Verso. Lefebvre, H. (2005) Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism. London: Verso. Lefebvre, H. and C. Regulier (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum. Leger, M.J. (2006) Henri Lefebvre and the Moment of the Aesthetic, pp. 143^60 in A. Hemingway (ed.) Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left. London: Pluto Press. Lepenies,W. (1992) Melancholy and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lwy, M. and R. Sayre (2001) Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maffesoli, M. (1998) Presentism ^ Or the Value of the Cycle, Journal for Cultural Research 2(2^3): 261^9.
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Moran, J. (2003) Benjamin and Boredom, Critical Quarterly 45(1^2): 168^81. Osborne, P. (2006) The Dreambird of Experience: Utopia, Possibility, Boredom, Radical Philosophy 137(May/June): 36^44. Phillips, A. (1993) On Being Bored, pp. 68^78 in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raposa, M. (1999) Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Salzani, C. (2009) The Atrophy of Experience: Walter Ben jamin and Boredom, pp. 127^54 in B. Dalle Pezze and C. Salzani (eds) Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schweitzer, H. (2008) On Waiting. London: Routledge. Simmel, G. (1997) The Metropolis and Mental Life, pp. 174^85 in G. Simmel, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. London: Sage. Spacks, P.M. (1995) Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Svendsen, L. (2005) A Philosophy of Boredom. London: Reaktion Books. Toohey, P. (1988) Some Ancient Notions of Boredom, Illinois Classical Studies 13(1): 151^64.
Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor in Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His books include the edited four-volume collection Mikhail Bakhtin: Masters of Modern Social Thought (Sage, 2003), Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with Michael M. Bell), The Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (Routledge, 1992), and a special double issue of the journal Cultural Studies, with the title Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out (co-edited with Gregory J. Seigworth; Routledge, 2004), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters dedicated to dialogical social theory, ethics, everyday life and utopianism. Forthcoming works include Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Peter Lang, 2012). [email: megardin@uwo.ca]

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

Theory, Culture & Society 29(2)

Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom

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