Boredom (Modern Malady or Medicine?)

Boredom

(Modern Malady or Medicine?)

Kaegh Allen

Kaegh Allen

New Urban Questions or Minor Infractions Boredom : Modern Malady or Medicine?

The value of boredom in the age of connection.

Kaegh Allen 4263359 29 January 2014 Lecturer: Patrick Healy

Boredom. Modern malady or medicine?

‘Boredom’s 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.’3

bore (bɔr, boʊr) v. bored, bor•ing, 1. to produce (a hole) in (a material) by use of a drill, auger, or other cutting tool 2. to tire or make weary by being dull, repetitious, or uninteresting

“Only boring people get bored.”

It is one of the most subtle yet defining statements that govern my life. Through every means possible, boredom must be averted - or I am boring.

Looking around on a train carriage or a school canteen the escape that saves the stranded from the sea of boredom are the small screens that light up their blank faces - catatonically connected. This essay aims to discover more about boredom based on reflections on Walter Benjamin’s uses of the term especially in ‘The Arcades Project’, then further acts as a personal exploration of what boredom could mean for daily contemporary life and also what role architecture could play in the discussion. Boredom, modern malady or medicine?

Boredom arose from the rise of modernity and industrialization - mass production and repetitive labour created the term, then the results of global consumerism and neo liberal ideals entrenched the condition. Walter Benjamin devoted a whole chapter of his Arcade’s Project to the subject in [Boredom, Eternal Return ]. He describes ‘the 1840s was 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.’

Walter Benjamin sees boredom in two ways and these come as a result of his explanation of pre and post modern lifestyles. Erfahrung and Erlebnis are two conditions often used by Benjamin and these set out the two states for boredom to be born. Erfahrung, which comes from the verb fahren, to travel and is thus something learned from life and travel over an extended period of time, this is hinted at being more worthwhile and linked to ancestral and traditional rhythms.

Modern experience, for which Benjamin uses the term Erlebnis, is instead broken, immediate, limited and disconnected from memory and community. The etymology of Erlebnis comes from leben, to live, and thus hints at something lived, temporal and spatially limited.5 Therefore when Benjamin explains boredom it is within the context of these two states.

One a almost meditative state that is under the threat of extinction the other a result of modernity and more of a ‘survival sickness of the comfortable classes’. Therefore Benjamin ‘sees boredom not simply as crucially related to modernity but as perhaps the quintessential experience of modern life.’2 Therefore as we veer further down the road of modern life perhaps boredom is entering a new manifestation and is now more than an experience, but a necessary modern medicine.

In a recent article in a British broadsheet newspaper there was an urgent warning that ‘Banning boredom from children’s lives will damage society’4. The article explained that ‘We should not fear boredom...quiet reflective time is just as important as purposeful activity’4 - it expressed a need for a critical awareness about our level of connectivity and its effect on daily interactions. What is raised is a fear of inactivity and the dread of not being connected. The suffocating effect of feeling disconnected, alone and ultimately ‘bored’.

‘Bored’ is such a loaded term - it brings to mind failure, a lack of interest an inability to engage, antisocial tendencies.

The feeling of anguish that the words ‘are we there yet?’ ignite within parents is an age old conundrum that is now being extinguished by gadgets to swipe and distract literally ‘a screen against stimuli’3.

But those brief moments of question, of wonder of reflection are important for children and adults alike. Only when we wonder where were going do we know if the destination is worth the journey.

‘Children are not oracles, but they ask with persistent regularity the great existential question, “What shall we do now?”

Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.’2 This modern obsession with connectivity is becoming more recognized - it is in all parts of popular culture and discussions from Hollywood movies to medical journals and seems to offer no foreseeable respite, ‘The child’s boredom thus seems to hold out the possibility of a fruitful inactivity and inertia even within the city, ‘where people make the most

Boring Postcards. Martin Parr. ‘today’s thrillingly modern is the subject of tomorrow’s boring postcard’ 2

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’3 If it is true that we are entering a new industrial revolution, one where the challenges of design are less focused of facilitating modes of consumption but rather on enabling the user to engage in modes of production - how does this affect our modes of ‘boredom’ and what effects will this have on our interactions, spaces and cognition?

With the possibility for almost everyone now to become the producer at some scale these is a content hum of productivity - everyone is always doing something. But these new tools of pseudo productivity are like straitjackets restraining us from entering a truly effective state of boredom, engagement and therefore production.

Benjamin describes his characters that illustrate his points, with their floury philosophies; ‘Rather than pass the time, one must invite it in. To pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore. To store time as a battery stores energy: the flaneur. Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form-that of expectation.’1 These characters seems to toy with time, or have a privileged capability to at least engage in some relationship with it boredom for them is ‘a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s own existence’.

Therefore “playing” seems to be an important tangent in the discussion.’Playing’ is linked to ‘habit’ and forms part of the basic rhythms of life ‘in which we first gain possession of ourselves’5, Benjamin thus describes that ‘habits are the armature of connected experiences (Erfahrungen). This armature is assailed by individual experiences (Erlebnissen)’1 The essence of play is thus the ‘transformation of a shattering experience into habit’5 These ideas fit best with another of Benjamin’s characters, that of ‘the Storyteller’ one that he uses to mourn the fact that he finds himself bored at dinner parties, ill at ease for what to do next and he explains that this is due to the fact that storytelling is inherently liked to boredom, it is the ‘play’ of ‘the Storyteller’ - his defence mechanism. Therefore by arguing that ‘there is no longer any place for boredom in our lives’5 he thus makes the point that the states of mental relaxation and meditative reflection that can be gained by ‘playing’ and thus relishing in ‘boredom’ are being extinguished by the distracted and disjointed states of current life.

One thing that is clear about ‘boredom’ is that it can be seen as a privileged sport and perhaps it is all just overintellectualising the bourgeois past-time of laziness, ‘those who can delegate the tedium of mundane tasks to their wives or servants, and have the leisure time to dwell on unfulfilled promise.’2. 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 life’s futility’ which ‘belongs to those with a sense of sublime potential, those who feel themselves superior to their environment’2 ‘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’.3 Benjamin also refers often to rain and ‘diminishing magical power of the rain’1 he explains that ‘Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos.’1 Rain here is a medium to distract - conversely he expresses that ‘Rain makes everything more hidden, makes days not only grey but uniform. From morning until evening, one can do the same thing – play chess, read, engage in argument – whereas sunshine, by contrast, shades the hours and discountenances the dreamer.’1 Rain allows the dreamer to engage with the constructive notion of boredom - but only the lucky have time to dream, ‘for the working class, industrial labour shatters the illusion that nature rather than society is to blame’2 The key issues that the discussion about boredom raises, especially is an era where we are so profoundly affected by the ramifications of capitalism and its effects, is essentially one about attention and distraction. The extents of what we deem to be important are constantly shifting especially in times of media historical transition.

‘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’.5 Our sensory apparatus has been so degraded under the impact of capitalism that we are no longer able to create an adequate sensory apprehension of our environment.7 Benjamin explained that unlike art which is experienced through concentration, architecture is experienced and seen through distraction. This is presumably based on the fact that architecture is often experienced subconsciously or at least cannot be eternally engaging.

‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’8 was a question asked by Nicholas Carr in 2008, the article explores the effect that the internet is having on our brain - explaining that the internet is to have far reaching effect on our cognition that are only now becoming apparent or being understood. Questions about attention, concentration and contemplation are key to the piece as the author explains that ‘Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski’8 - this limited depth is justified by many for the sake of efficiency.

The Modern Man ‘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.’2

The discipline of D.E. (Do Easy) - William. S. Burroughs, 1973 DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE. You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Consider the weight of objects: exactly how much force is needed to get the object from here to there? Consider its shape and texture and function. Where exactly does it belong? Use just the amount of force necessary to get the object from here to there. Don’t fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest. Guide the dustpan lightly to the floor as if you were landing a plane.

Alarmingly though there is the potential that we may just become ‘mere decoders of information’8 as we reject direct experience in favour of broadcasted media. Carr explains that the internet now is ‘becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV’8 the implications of this is that it undoubtedly scatters our attention and diffuse our concentration - we stopped listening to our senses and plugged into the net.

Benjamin explained the benefits of finding boredom in the city, a search for those spaces that are perhaps less compelling but give an insight into real life - the everyday. 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 city’s 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’2 Perhaps these spaces now exist in other realms - how easy it is to fly to remote corners of the globe, to remote mountain tracks or suburban cul-de-sacs, all from the confront of you laptop screen - what are the repercussions of this omnipotence? of this robotic flâneury?

‘The Death of the Cyberflâneur’ interestingly delves in the idea of Benjamin’s ‘Dandy’ as having an ultramodern counterpart, “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”. The New York Times article explains the hope that that the internet sparked in the hearts of bohemians and hedonists ‘It’s easy to see, then, why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”). In the article the author explains the state of affairs that proved these dreams to be false, with a fetishistic desire for sharing that rendered all exploration and solitary quests for boredom null and void. Just like his original counterpart, the fate of the cyberflaneur was doomed; ‘if today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.’9 ‘Boredom is only useful when it makes us realise that the tedium of eternal sameness – capitalism’s endless search for novelty and innovation which is in fact merely an endless repetition because it always takes a similar form – can be broken.

Boredom’s 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?’2 - just as fundamental is the question ‘Where shall we spend our time?’ and this perhaps is where architecture can comment. It seems that architecture only has two valid routes of attack if it is to counter or even engage with this tidal wave of change in peoples attention and ability to reach a satisfactory level of pure boredom - ‘We cannot find the quiet and solitude necessary ‘to be thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves’’2 One is to adapt. To mould the form of the architect as a building maker and interact with this new digital realm of space.

The architecture that takes up most of our daily time and head-space is actually programmes and software, therefore architecture and architects should aim to male the process of transition between the digital and the physical to fluid that they become each and the same. This requires learning new languages : programming, scripting, jargon - and it also requires a more open and networked approach to designing. Each part of the process must be made for and as part of this overgrowing networked society - opensource, collective commons, complex. This requires perhaps relinquishing power in order to be powerful - but this is the future or design.

No Where to Go? ‘There is a shift from eighteenth-century notions of boredom, which saw it as an individual’s personal responsibility or moral failing, to more fatalistic and sociological nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions which situated the sources of boredom outside the self, this ‘reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power’.’3

The second is to resign. To create architecture that actively disengages itself from modernity and even life itself. Great temples of architectural contemplation such as themes in the Swiss mountains act as points of pilgrimage to search a method to disengage, disconnect and dip into boredom. There seems to be a rise also in self induced technophobia as a backlash to current trends, Quiet Time Programmes5 have been implemented in schools to promote meditation as a means of relaxation and contemplation in troubled schools in the USA and UK with aims of ‘improving academic performance and reducing stress and violence’5. Perhaps these methods could be integrated more in cities or even in very designs of schools and cities? Perhaps there is a need for rooms that block mobile phone signals for socially oriented establishments like meeting rooms or classrooms? How long will it take until ‘Social isolation caused by smart-phone obsession’ becomes enough of a taboo to be treated like smoking in public places?

But ultimately just like relishing in any vice, time is ours to waste as we wish. But only through an analysis of what we hold valuable can it be distributed effectively and fairly - ‘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.’2 These activities that Benjamin refers to are subjective and ever-changing - the interesting situation arises when we try to imagine or discover the moments and activities that engage with new forms of boredom and the architectural products of these engagements.

Therefore we must ponder if these are really new urban questions worth raising and that as we live ever more harder, better, faster, stronger perhaps there are modes of interaction and therefore ultimately new forms of boredom that are being created that are beyond our current comprehension, and dwelling on the matter is futile, just traditionalist mumblings on minor infractions - ‘people today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored’10 Personally I believe there is a need to reflect, acknowledge and engage with ‘‘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’’2 these small vignettes of meditation are ever more precious - ‘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.’2 and give us a critical view into our routines and habits ‘boredom helps to develop a critical awareness of those activities which are ordinarily too banal or repetitive to merit attention.’2 ‘We need to use this present moment to bring about change, to blast ‘the now [. . .] out of the continuum of history’.

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’3 These revolutionary actions are essentially things that must be done on a personal and private level, but perhaps there are aspects of daily life, especially in cities, that architecture can aim to engage with to aid these revolutionaries of boredom.

Therefore, in light of these questions perhaps we should bravely endeavour to thoroughly, purely and blissfully - bore.

Bibliography 1. Walter Benjamin, 2002. The Arcades Project. Edition. Belknap Press.

2. Joe Moran, 2003. Criticism: Benjamin and boredom. Critical Quarterly. Volume 45, Issue 1-2, pages 168–181, July 2003 3. Adam Phillips, 1998. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. 0 Edition. Harvard University Press.

4. Simon Kelner, 2014. Banning boredom from children’s lives will damage society. The Independent, 9 January 2014. UK. 5. Carlo Salzani, 2009. Essays on Boredom and Modernity. (Critical Studies Series). Edition. Rodopi.

6. David Lynch, 2014. Quiet Time Program. http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/schools.html 7. Attention, 2014. Princeton Audio Journal : On Attention. http://www.attentionjournal.com/issues/on-attention 8. Nicholas Carr, 2008. Is Google Making Us Stupid?. The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008.

9. Evgeny Morozov, 2012. The Death of the Cyberflaneur. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/ the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html. Published: February 4, 2012 10. Siegfried Kracauer, 1926. Boredom. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~stou0046/kracauer