JOE MORAN

Benjamin and boredom

One of the reasons that boredom remains so interesting as a subject of
cultural criticism is that it cuts to the heart of the complex relationship
between everyday life and modernity. Theorists of the everyday have often
seen the sphere of day-to-day experience as, in Michael Trebitschs words,
both a parody of lost plenitude and the last remaining vestige of that
plenitude.
1
On the one hand, the everyday shows that modernity has
penetrated into the minutiae of ordinary lives by imposing repetitive and
mechanical rhythms on work and leisure; on the other hand, the everyday
provides a space for residual experiences which escape co-optation into the
homogenising processes of modern life, precisely because of their supposed
boredom and banality. Walter Benjamins perennial interest in boredom
works productively around this tension. It is significant that he never
precisely defines boredom, and it is used in often contradictory senses in
his work: it is both the ennui experienced by the fashionable dandies and
boulevardiers of the city, and a more productive type of boredom which
provides access to half-buried memories, missed historical opportunities
and revolutionary possibilities.
Boredom and modernity
The etymology of boredom suggests that it is a historically constituted
feeling which developed, or which at least was first known and spoken
about, with the birth of modernity: the verb to bore was first used in the
middle of the eighteenth century, while the noun boredom dates only from
the mid-nineteenth century.
2
Benjamin, too, sees boredom not simply as
crucially related to modernity but as perhaps the quintessential experience
of modern life. In his most extended discussion of the topic, though,
Benjamins focus is not on the boredom induced by the regimented linear
time of modernity the deadening repetitiveness of machine-led factory
conditions, the rhythm and monotony of administrative procedures and
timetables. In the section on boredom in the Convolutes, part of his mammoth
Arcades Project, Benjamin focuses primarily on the world of the street rather
than the factory, while also ignoring the sphere of domestic routine occupied
primarily by women. When Benjamin marks the 1840s as a period in which
boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions, he is referring
to a particular kind of boredom afflicting the frequenters of the new
arcades, built in the fashionable quarters of Paris in the first half of the
nineteenth century.
3
He focuses especially on the figures of the flaneur, the dandy and the
gambler, who are threatened with a new kind of boredom which is
paradoxically induced by the accelerated pace of change in the modern city,
and the inability to experience it except as a series of fluid and fleeting
impressions. Faced with the restless activity and frightening anonymity of
urban life, the modern metropolitan develops a blase personality as a
defence mechanism, a screen against stimuli.
4
For Benjamin, one of the
most significant developments of modernity is the replacement of Erfahrung
with Erlebnis: in other words, the capacity to assimilate, recollect and
communicate experience to others is replaced by the sense of life as a series
of disconnected impressions with no common associations. The man who is
denied the potential for Erfahrung is a hostage to boredom, since he feels as
though he is dropped from the calendar. The big-city dweller knows this
feeling on Sundays.
5
The sentiment to which Benjamin refers might be more specifically
described as ennui, a word which he sometimes uses interchangeably with
boredom. Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that, while boredom is usually
seen as a temporary and trivial state, ennui is often characterised as a state
of the soul defying remedy, an existential perception of lifes futility which
belongs to those with a sense of sublime potential, those who feel them-
selves superior to their environment.
6
As she suggests, this distinction is
both class and gender specific, since ennui is more likely to be experienced
by those who can delegate the tedium of mundane tasks to their wives or
servants, and have the leisure time to dwell on unfulfilled promise. This
sense of boredom as a more generalised angst or Weltschmerz is encapsu-
lated for Benjamin in Emile Tardieus now forgotten book, LEnnui (1902),
which he defines as a sort of breviary for the twentieth century while also
dismissing it as indicative of a spiritually barren, petit-bourgeois discontent.
7
Benjamin thus seeks to acknowledge the importance of ennui as a
culturally significant sentiment while dispensing with its glamour. By
describing the repetitiveness of factory labour as the economic infra-
structure of the ideological boredom of the upper classes, he suggests that
ennui can be connected with more mundane types of boredom through
an awareness of class struggle.
8
While leisure provides the illusion of
individualistic escape from the monotony of life and work under capitalism,
boredom in fact threatens the leisure classes as much as it does the workers
Benjamin and boredom 169
at their machines. The conspicuous idleness of the dandy or flaneur, taking
his tortoise for a walk in the arcades, only underlines the fact that he has
nothing useful to do. Similarly, the games of chance undertaken by the
gambler seem to have the capacity to alleviate boredom in an increasingly
administered and bureaucratic society, in that they possess the great charm
of freeing people from having to wait.
9
In reality, of course, this frantic
search for instant gratification is still under the spell of the commodity, and
the spinning of the roulette wheel, while charged with dramatic possibilities
for the gambler, is actually as repetitive and predictable as the movements
of the factory worker:
The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup in a game of
chance [. . .] Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the
preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that pre-
ceded it, the drudgery of the labourer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the
drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.
10
The leisure classes, though, are unable or unwilling to understand that their
idleness is the result of specific historical conditions. As Susan Buck-Morss,
in her discussion of Benjamin, puts it:
The upper classes do not know, and do not wish to know, that the objective
source of boredom is because history is languishing and the moment of their
own overthrow is delayed. They are addicted to boredom, as they are to
remaining asleep. The average man and the poet blames boredom on the
weather. But for the working class, industrial labor shatters the illusion that
nature rather than society is to blame.
11
Benjamins understanding of boredom thus anticipates the work of
Situationist philosophers such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, and
theorists of the everyday such as Henri Lefebvre. These critics also focus
centrally on the status of leisure time as an apparently autonomous sphere,
and the way that this actively conceals its systemic relationship to
capitalism as a whole. In the work of the Situationists, in particular, bore-
dom is linked to what Vaneigem calls survival sickness, a product of the
shift from a society based on mass production to one based on consumption
and spectacle. Capitalism has created a universe of expanding technology
and comfort [. . .] a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of
starvation, entails the risk of dying of boredom.
12
Unlike Benjamin, though,
Vaneigems emphasis on modern life as a series of soporific distractions
concentrates not on the leisure classes in the nineteenth-century city but
on the contemporary suburban masses. This translates into a certain
condescension about the commuting office-workers who are turning in
upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for details,
170 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
and who must now rely on subways and suburban trains for their pitiful
wanderings.
13
But the value of the work of the Situationists is that it
suggests that the everyday, while apparently divided into separate activities
such as work and leisure, is made up of different elements working together
to perpetuate a single system. While the increasing comfort of certain
sections of society means that they tend to blame their ennui on mundane
details, a truly historical understanding of boredom shows it to be the
product of much broader and interrelated forces.
Boredom and Erfahrung
As we have seen, Benjamin also writes about boredom as a kind of survival
sickness of the comfortable classes, but this is only part of his argument. The
complexity of this argument becomes particularly apparent in the discussion
of rain in the Convolutes. As Buck-Morss notes above, one of Benjamins
examples of the way in which boredom has narrowed the horizons of the
upper classes is that the weather has become a frequent topic of conver-
sation and a source of complaint:
The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle
personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and
most genial manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more
characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the
working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their
emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos.
14
In one of the many gnomic statements of the Convolutes, Benjamin suggests
that a characteristic feature of modernity is the diminishing magical power
of the rain.
15
The appeal of the arcades is not only that they exclude the
undesirable elements of the Parisian population but that they provide
shelter in bad weather. Benjamin even unearths an obscure late-nineteenth-
century text by Leo Claretie which imagines a Paris of the future entirely
enclosed within a crystal canopy to protect it from the rain.
16
Bored
urbanites have lost the ability to take delight in the world around them, and
nature has been wholly anthropomorphised, becoming either a simple
hindrance to the artificial pleasures of modernity or a boring topic of phatic
conversation. Significantly, Tardieus book blames the weather, among
other things, for inducing boredom.
17
This emphasis on boredom as an
external and temporary annoyance prevents its sufferers from thinking
objectively about the deeper reasons for their disquiet. In the same section
of the Convolutes, however, Benjamins discussion of a rainy day in the city
hints at other possibilities for boredom: Rain makes everything more hidden,
makes days not only gray but uniform. From morning until evening, one
Benjamin and boredom 171
can do the same thing play chess, read, engage in argument whereas
sunshine, by contrast, shades the hours and discountenances the dreamer.
18
This seems to be a quite different notion of boredom: the monotony of a
rainy day imposes inactivity on the city dweller, temporarily quelling the
intoxicating experience of her surroundings and providing a space for
reflection.
In some of Benjamins other work, he further develops this more
constructive notion of boredom in relation to different ways of absorbing
experience in modern culture. In The Storyteller, for example, he discusses
the decline of oral tale-telling in modern culture, and its replacement by
merely informational and reportorial forms, so that no event any longer
comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. For
Benjamin, the most valuable forms of experience are those that cannot be
condensed into an easily transmissible message or gobbet of wisdom. The
capacity to assimilate the kind of experience whose chaste compactness
[. . .] precludes psychological analysis, though, requires a state of silence
and contemplation which is becoming more and more difficult to achieve in
modern, urban culture. Unlike the ennui of the flaneur or the gambler, there
is another type of boredom which allows this state to be attained. For
Benjamin,
boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience [Erfahrung]. A
rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places the activities that
are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the cities and
are declining in the country as well.
19
The value of this kind of boredom seems to be that, in itself resisting
interpretation or analysis, it offers an opportunity for critical reflection in
the crowded and cacophonous spaces of the city. In this sense, Benjamins
work partly connects with that of the contemporary critic, Adam Phillips,
whose writings tend to focus on everyday feelings and experiences such as
boredom, flirtation and worrying, which are normally overlooked by what
he calls the gothic melodrama of the Freudian or neo-Freudian model of
emotional development.
20
Psychoanalysis, Phillips suggests, is always trying
to turn the ostensibly boring into the searingly significant. Freuds The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), for example, suggests that apparently
mundane everyday actions or blunders are psychically motivated, ways of
avoiding pain or fulfilling repressed wishes which are located within the
simmering cauldron of the unconscious. In emphasising the hidden potency
of our inner lives, Phillips argues, psychoanalysis has tended to equate
significance with intensity and so has rarely found a place, in theory, for all
those less vehement, vaguer, often more subtle feelings and moods that
172 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
much of our lives consist of.
21
We should not be so keen to transform
boredom into something interesting or important, or to interpret experi-
ences whose origins or motives cannot be easily explained.
In another essay, Phillips uses Proust to make a suggestive link between
boredom and the processes of memory:
The past that is inside us is not, for Proust, busily and furtively arranging for
its own disclosure, is not seeking attention [. . .] And we will probably only
come across it when we are doing something else; we cannot organize a quest
for the past, nor is the past pursuing us with its essential messages and
unfinished projects.
22
Along with Phillips, Benjamin uses Prousts work to argue that boredom
provides access to memories of the everyday which might remain
inaccessible in a more conscious, organised search for the past. Since the
shock nature of modern experience produces a kind of erasure of traditional
memory processes, the only way of retaining experience is through the
Proustian memoire involontaire.
23
The home of this type of involuntary
memory is the apparently trivial and random act, such as tasting a piece of
madeleine soaked in tea, because in order to get a real sense of the lived
past, we need to circumvent the intellect or the conscious will to remember.
The significance of boredom is that it allows this circumvention to be
achieved. Its blankness and elusiveness, its lack of attachment to a clear
object of desire, temporarily suppresses the need to interpret and make
sense of experience which, for Phillips, usually characterises psycho-
analysis.
Unlike Phillips, though, Benjamin goes on to argue that the value of
boredom is that it allows us to move from individual psychology to
collective history, a position which becomes clearer in his discussion of
Surrealism. The Surrealists also work with the apparently boring, seeking
to convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway
journeys [. . .] on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters
of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of
a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.
24
But the
Surrealists interest in profane illumination, in the insights gained through
an examination of the unpromising and discarded material of the everyday,
is compromised by their flirtation with the occult and spiritualism, the
histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious.
25
Along with Freud, they suggest that the ordinary is just a veneer on which
we can read the disruptive traces of the unconscious.
The problem with Surrealism, for Benjamin, is that its emphasis on the
shock of the bizarre has no real basis in history or community. If boredom is
Benjamin and boredom 173
always the external surface of unconscious events [. . .] a warm gray fabric
lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks, within
which we wrap ourselves when we dream, then it is not so much the home
of individual dreams or memories as a kind of collective unconscious which
potentially allows for the dissolution of mythology into the space of
history.
26
This is what makes boredom a potentially productive form of
dreaming, unlike the myths of commodity capitalism, which play on indi-
vidual anxieties and desires and thus suppress the capacity for collective
understanding or action. The ability of boredom to open up repressed
collective memories is particularly valuable in a modernity which
increasingly threatens to separate public and private space through its
covered arcades and sumptuous bourgeois interiors.
In a short essay written for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924, Benjamins
friend Siegfried Kracauer also recommends cultivating a particular kind of
boredom as a response to the distractions of the commodity in the modern
city, where we cannot find the quiet and solitude necessary to be thoroughly
bored with the world as it ultimately deserves. Kracauer argues that we are
often caught between the vulgar boredom of daily drudgery, which makes
us feel that our dissatisfaction will end as soon as a more pleasurable
activity comes along, and a controlled leisure time, in which although one
wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one
does not find oneself. By hanging around aimlessly in railway stations or
staying at home alone on the sofa with the curtains drawn, though, we can
reach a state of personal boredom which escapes the anonymity of a daily
life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone.
27
While Kracauers argument mirrors Benjamins in its attempt to
recuperate the more productive aspects of boredom, it arguably reproduces
a class-based notion of ennui in its emphasis on a personal sense of
alienation which is shrouded in tristezza. For Kracauer, boredom is not
primarily a way of accessing overlooked collective experience, but is a way
of recovering ones self, a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in
control of ones own existence.
28
That not everyone has the resources for
this kind of boredom is clear from Kracauers writings on the Angestellten,
the low-status white-collar workers who escape the tedium of their jobs
through the bright lights, drinking bars and movie houses of Berlin, a flight
of images which is also a flight from revolution and from death.
29
Boredom, memory and the everyday
Benjamins work on boredom is distinct from Kracauers, then, in that he
stresses that boredom can reveal the traces of a communal everyday life
174 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
which ordinarily remains invisible. Like Maurice Blanchot, Benjamin
suggests that the experience of boredom helps to develop a critical aware-
ness of those activities which are ordinarily too banal or repetitive to merit
attention. As Blanchot writes, we are at the same time engulfed within and
deprived of the everyday, which remains resistant to knowledge precisely
because it is so familiar. The value of boredom, or perhaps what is too easily
dismissed as boredom in a society based on consumption and spectacle, is
that it represents the everyday become manifest: as a consequence of
having lost its essential constitutive trait of being unperceived.
30
Benjamins interests thus often centre around the bric-a`-brac and marginalia
of culture, such as childrens books, old toys, stamps and postcards, because
these objects do not use the smoothness and coherence of narrative to
obscure the banal details of everyday life. In his discussion of collecting,
Benjamin makes it clear that only certain types of collection manage to
avoid this narrative patterning. One mode of collecting is suggested by the
bourgeois coziness of nineteenth-century domestic space, with its beautiful
ornaments and curios.
31
For Benjamin, the lavishly furnished bourgeois
interior, which, like the arcades, began to flourish in France during the reign
of Louis Philippe, represents a denial of the public sphere in its celebration
of fashion, security and comfort, an attempt to bury history in chintz. A
certain type of collector who has made the glorification of things his
concern is the true inhabitant of the interior.
32
This type of professional
collector values an object not for its original function or historical value but
for its relation to other elements in a series, so that it becomes enclosed
within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder
of being acquired), it turns to stone.
33
Another, more interesting mode of collecting, though, places objects
together not because they are fashionable and collectible but because they
are commonplace and boring. This mode is evident in the ragpickers
chaotic assemblage of material, the aborted and broken-down matter of
the junk shops, and the second-hand bookstores in which dusty tied-up
bundles tell of all sorts of failure.
34
Here the absence of cultural or
economic capital makes it easier for the object to be invested with a kind of
emotional memory. If it is the aim of fashion and novelty to triumph over
the dead,
35
then the value of the boring is that it does not try to conceal
death or ruination, the residual life of objects once they have ceased to be
fashionable or interesting.
The boredom of the recently voguish reveals the dependence of
capitalism on built-in obsolescence and the stimulation of faddish tastes.
But it also points to the possibility of a kind of communal remembrance
even within the alienated spaces of modernity. An object is fashionable
Benjamin and boredom 175
when it is a positional good, new and exclusive enough not to have been
widely disseminated or possessed. As Susan Stewart suggests, though, once
they are dislocated from their original contexts as markers of individual
style and sophistication, the kitsch objects of the recent past provide access
not to the privatised world of the bourgeois interior but to a kind of
collective memory, institut[ing] a nostalgia of the populace which in fact
makes the populace itself a kind of subject [. . .] They are souvenirs of an era
and not of a self.
36
This is also what Benjamin seems to mean when he refers
to broken-down matter as the elevation of the commodity to the status of
allegory. The professional collector of fashionable ornaments is the opposite
of the allegorist, because he or she is engaged in a struggle against dis-
persion,
37
trying to control and order the world by making sense of a small,
enclosed part of it. The allegorist, by contrast, opens objects up to concealed
and elusive meanings, exposing the fashionable as the soon-to-be-antiquated,
a symptom of the collective disappointments experienced under capitalism.
Benjamins writings on the city also often focus on boredom as a key to
opening up neglected stories and memories of everyday life. This kind of
boredom pervades the less fashionable quarters of the city or the ruins of
the formerly fashionable. In Marseilles, for example, Benjamin seeks out not
the tourist centres but the citys inner streets, the monotonous rows of
houses of people who have lived there for years those places that give
nothing away to the traveller and where the whole world shrinks to a
single Sunday afternoon.
38
For Benjamin, the figure of the child embodies
the experience of boredom in the city. He imagines childhood as a state
which is wholly alien from adulthood, but not in order to romanticise it as
an era of Edenic innocence. Instead, he sees it is a period of boredom and
estrangement, of waiting for an unknown future and accumulating experi-
ences which cannot be understood until adulthood. This is encapsulated in
Benjamins description of his own childhood in A Berlin Chronicle, as he
recalls lagging a half step behind his irritated mother on city walks and
being dragged reluctantly around department stores to buy a new suit. The
young Benjamin is bored because he is immune to the phantasmagoric
delights of the city and the lure of the commodity, and longs to escape the
false worship that humiliated our mother before idols bearing the names of
[chic designers]. However, his boredom and melancholy mean that he is
open to other kinds of experience, having an obscure awareness of
moments when [the city] bears witness to the dead.
39
Unaffected by the
deadening nature of habit, the young Benjamin has the time to find interest
in what the adult discards as boring he is the supreme collector in the
allegorist mode, accumulating not an ordered series of artefacts but dis-
ordered found objects: Each stone he finds, each flower picked and each
176 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
butterfly caught is already the start of a collection [. . .] His drawers must
become arsenal and zoo, crime museum and crypt.
40
The childs boredom
thus seems to hold out the possibility of a fruitful inactivity and inertia even
within the city, where people make the most ruthless demands on one
another, where appointments and telephone calls, sessions and visits,
flirtations and the struggle for existence grant the individual not a single
moment of contemplation.
41
If childhood is a privileged form of seeing, then the boredom of the city
can also be captured through another form of seeing, the purely mechanical
ability of photography to foreground apparently insignificant details, the
fleeting and otherwise overlooked elements of everyday life. Benjamins
interest in the Parisian photography of Euge`ne Atget stems precisely from
its emphasis on what is unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift.
42
His often
unpeopled photographs, of deserted streets and reflective shopfronts with
tailors dummies dressed in the later fashions, are like scenes of crime,
vessels of a memory of recent, bustling activity.
43
In Atgets work, the
stillness and boredom of uninhabited sites allows them paradoxically to
function as evidence of the communal everyday, as the dwelling place of
the collective.
44
In this context, Benjamin would surely have been interested in Martin
Parrs recent books of Boring Postcards.
45
Parrs collections are made up of
cards, produced mainly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, of mundane sites in
Britain, the USA and Germany. Here boredom migrates from the city to
suburbia and its routeways in the form of photographs of new towns,
motorway service areas, trailer villages, truck stops, motel rooms, toll
bridges and interstate highways. If we read these pictures as amusing
kitsch, a reading which may account for the commercial success of these
books, then we are only repeating the ahistoricism of capitalisms endless
search for the new and improved. In fact, the boredom of these postcards
exposes not only the recently fashionable but, by extension, the currently
fashionable as well. If contemporary examples of the dismally humdrum,
such as tower blocks and ringroads, were seen only recently as symbols of
thrilling modernity, then todays thrillingly modern is the subject of
tomorrows boring postcard. This is particularly apparent in the case of the
German postcards, where different visions of modernity clash in competing
views from East and West. In the East, there are prefabricated apartment
blocks and grim Baltic resorts with holiday camps that look like army
barracks; in the West there are corporate-owned motorway service stations
and the bland frontages of international chain hotels. Both now look equally
obsolete, showing how quickly the self-consciously ultramodern can be
absorbed into the blandness of the everyday.
Benjamin and boredom 177
But these postcards are also interesting because their boredom opens up a
space for histories and memories. Boring postcards subvert the conven-
tional visual codes of the noteworthy and picturesque, revealing traces of
everyday life which might normally go unnoticed. Embedded in barely
noticed routine and insignificant detail, the memories contained in these
photographs refuse the consolations of nostalgia or any other obvious
meanings. The sadness and decay they communicate cannot be linked to a
specific object or moment a reminder that, in the area of mundane
experience, as Benjamin puts it, history decays into images, not into
stories.
46
The value of boredom
For Benjamin, then, boredom is both part of the problem and potentially a
way of solving that problem, a symptom of the complacency of the leisure
classes and an antidote to that complacency. In a key passage in the
Convolutes, he describes boredom as an index to participation in the sleep of
the collective.
47
Boredom is found in shared aspects of the social world,
particularly in the forms of accidental community that the city produces
such as the commute, the queue and the street crowd. The problem is that
the dreaming collective knows no history: it therefore experiences the
common condition of boredom, which is produced by specific historical
circumstances, as a form of ahistorical and personal alienation.
48
Spacks
traces a shift from eighteenth-century notions of boredom, which saw it as
an individuals personal responsibility or moral failing, to more fatalistic
and sociological nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions which situated
the sources of boredom outside the self. As Spacks argues, this reflects a
state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance
and ever less power.
49
The danger of this attitude is that hell can become
other people, and existential angst can cancel out the opportunity for
collective transformation. Boredoms residual traces of the collective,
though, also have the potential to undermine the hallucinatory power of
the commodity and awaken us from the dream-filled sleep of capitalism.
50
Benjamin is thus careful not to give way to pure fatalism, as is made clear
in his critical interest in Nietzsches doctrine of eternal recurrence: the
notion that, since existence consists of a finite number of variables occurring
within infinite time, any event has already occurred in the past and will
recur in the future. In the idea of eternal recurrence, Benjamin argues,
the historicism of the nineteenth century capsizes.
51
Nietzsche usefully
challenges the notion of history as a linear narrative of progress occurring
within homogeneous empty time, which conceals the reality of history as
178 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
nothing more than a triumphal procession in which the present rulers step
over those who are lying prostrate.
52
But Benjamin also accuses Nietzsche
of fatalism in his creation of a magic circle of eternal return in which
nothing ever changes. For Benjamin, the nineteenth-century confidence in
progress and the doctrine of eternal return are complementary: while the
former assumes that progress can be achieved without the resolution of the
contradictions of class society, the latter believes that these contradictions
will never be resolved because the same mistakes will always be repeated.
In both instances, the missing element is a dialectical understanding of
history.
53
Boredom is only useful when it makes us realise that the tedium of
eternal sameness capitalisms endless search for novelty and innovation
which is in fact merely an endless repetition because it always takes a
similar form can be broken. Boredoms revolutionary promise lies in its
capacity to dispense with the often mistaken convictions and assumptions
which give meaning to our lives, and to require us to face the fundamental
question: how should we actually spend our time? As Benjamin writes: We
are bored when we dont know what we are waiting for. That we do know,
or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or
inattention.
54
For Adam Phillips, too, boredom is about being shaken out of our
certainty that we know what we are waiting for. As such, it can be a way of
closing down possibilities, being one of the ways we break our habit of
believing in the future.
55
Boredom, being focused on a kind of mental block
in the present which prevents us from moving forward, protects the
individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting
for something without knowing what it could be. But being bored is also a
way of opening up possibilities, by suggesting that this is not all there is,
that there might be alternative states of existence when we are not bored.
If boredom is a defence against waiting, it is also at one remove, an
acknowledgement of the possibility of desire. There is always a chance that
it will develop into a critically reflexive form of waiting, that the individual
will become brave enough to let his feelings develop in the absence of an
object towards a possible object, as it were and by doing so commit
himself, or rather, entrust himself, to the inevitable elusiveness of that
object. Boredom makes us aware that we are not leading charmed lives,
that the linear narratives of development which we construct around our
personal histories are often flimsy and provisional.
56
Within a psychotherapeutic context, Phillips is clearly using his ideas
about boredom to challenge a straightforwardly developmental model of
the human psyche, and to propose instead a kind of postmodern acceptance
Benjamin and boredom 179
of play, pleasure and the present moment. If Phillipss rejection of develop-
mental narratives finds a parallel in Benjamins suspicion of a linear
historicism, the latters argument is distinctive in its insistence that boredom
needs to be transformed into something else. If all that we have is the
boredom of the present moment, which will not be dissipated by
capitalisms search for novelty and distraction or the elusive dream of
future progress, then we need to use this present moment to bring about
change, to blast the now [. . .] out of the continuum of history.
57
Boredom is
thus only useful when it becomes the impetus for great deeds, which
happens when it is conjoined with its dialectical antithesis, revolutionary
action.
58
For Benjamin, the value of boredom is that it can form the
beginnings of an awareness that the dull monotony of the present will only
end with a resolution of the deeper contradictions of society, and the
creation of an alternative society based on true creativity and pleasure.
Notes
1 Michael Trebitsch, Preface, in Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1,
Introduction, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), xxiv.
2 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9.
3 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1999), 108.
4 Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 160.
5 Ibid., 1867.
6 Spacks, Boredom, 27, 12.
7 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105, 102.
8 Ibid., 106.
9 Ibid., 119.
10 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 1345.
11 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 105.
12 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (London: Rebel Press/Left Bank Books, 1994), 159160, 18.
13 Ibid., 160, 39.
14 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1012.
15 Ibid., 102.
16 Ibid., 109.
17 Ibid., 105.
18 Ibid., 104.
19 Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, in Illuminations, 8991.
20 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (London: Faber and Faber,
1993), 71.
180 Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, nos. 12
21 Ibid., 71.
22 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 15.
23 Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, in Illuminations, 204.
24 Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,
in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 229.
25 Ibid., 237.
26 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1056, 458.
27 Siegfried Kracauer, Boredom, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.
and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995),
3312.
28 Ibid., 334.
29 Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar
Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), 94.
30 Maurice Blanchot, Everyday Speech, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 13, 16.
31 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 216.
32 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 168.
33 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 205.
34 Ibid., 203.
35 Ibid., 112.
36 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 167.
37 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 207, 211.
38 Walter Benjamin, Marseilles, in One-Way Street, 21112.
39 Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, in One-Way Street, 294, 327, 316.
40 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, in One-Way Street, 734.
41 Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, 318.
42 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography, in One-Way Street, 250.
43 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in
Illuminations, 228.
44 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 423.
45 Martin Parr, Boring Postcards (London: Phaidon, 1999); Martin Parr, Boring
Postcards USA (London: Phaidon, 2000); Martin Parr, Langweilige Postkarten
(London: Phaidon, 2001).
46 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 476.
47 Ibid., 108.
48 Ibid., 546.
49 Spacks, Boredom, ix, 13.
50 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 391.
51 Ibid., 116.
52 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, 263,
258.
53 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 119.
54 Ibid., 105.
55 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 54.
56 Phillips, On Kissing, 80, 82.
57 Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 263.
58 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105.
Benjamin and boredom 181