5. The Politics of Boredom

Are we wanted to be bored? Which are the systems in place that quietly urge and lure us to pass our time or fulfill duties and jobs we think are important? The politics of boredom swivel around these questions. Restlessness and eventfulness versus having nothing to do and silence. Stress and burnout which are all too familiar. How do we relate ourselves to boredom?

‘At the same time, boredom is regularly dismissed as trivial, [and] naturalised as a common and inevitable dimension of being human and rarely subject to the public concern and action that surrounds other affects.’[1] In a neoliberal, Fordian life such crises are inevitable, and are products in as much of money and social structure, as the class politics of boredom. Quoting Anderson, ‘A ‘crisis’ of neoliberalism: racialised resentment, a feeling of being left behind, online outrage, anger at elites and so on. Boredom does not seem to quite fit with these strong stories about the role of heightened passions in a turbulent present. However, if we slow down and pay attention, we find that claims about boredom as [a] collective condition or bored subjects surface in the background to many recent attempts to diagnose the affective character of the present: cycles of online outrage interrupt the almost but not quite boredom of the scroll; boredom settles in peripheral places supposedly left behind by a rapacious global capital; it exists as a felt consequence of austerity in places where youth services have contracted; it can be a symptom of burnout.’[2]

The dangers of what uncontrolled boredom creates./?

Precarisation: Increasing the levels of precarity within youth, and not knowing what to do becoming a recurring sentiment in many neighbourhoods. Of which boredom has been ‘ethnographically observed [in] the most economically vulnerable’.[3] And where it plays: At ‘the intersection of boredom within the workings of advanced capitalism’.[4] That feeling of the enduring, sharp glass fragments of the global financial crisis in 2008 which still cut us. Step outside, and you enter the aggressive urban arena of labour markets. The prospect of a future, rejection, often comes as a pervasive experience. We’re bored in our bodies, we’re bored in our minds. Or like Spinoza’s affectus, affect philosophy, the diminution of a body's capacity to act.[5] But boredom is two-sided. Boredom doesn’t have to be about depression and loneliness. Boredom is productive and versatile. ‘Which can succeed in promoting and sustaining positive social transformations. ‘Boredom is explicitly a self-focused feeling. I am bored. I do not see meaning in what is in front of me. I need something. I am lacking something. Boredom is all about me. If we respond to this by retreating further into ourselves, we will necessarily fail to appreciate the ideas and opinions of others with an open mind.’[6]

The subject requires a rethinking, and treating boredom as a travelling concept in our social settings. Some people are more prone to boredom. Boredom, when and if weaponised, is a lethal means available to the hands of anyone. It grows from its symptoms to a chronic condition, that when left unchecked creates zombie-like humans who eat, drink, sleep, and work on someone else’s capitalistic routine. All Hail for the taxpayer’s money./! There are ‘two fundamental concepts of boredom which are one, emptiness-boredom and two, repetition-boredom’.[7] Equivalent to the continuous feeling of feeling empty on the inside even though you do do a day’s work each day.

But, how does our personal view of boredom fit into the larger picture? Or into the tainted and dirtied frame of sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts? Identifying oneself as “a work-in-progress” doesn’t necessarily mean we’re moving forward. It can also mean you only move around in a circle, going from point A and reaching point B on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. It’s relevantly complex and dull all at once.

Boredom promotes decreased thinking processes and capacity within a population which invites the creation of a robotic populace with less or no innovative capability = intellectual → national stagnation due to the deteriorating/frozen fields of science, mathematics, research, the visual and performing arts, health care, empathy, and so on. The need to make sense of this noise; at home, on our mobile phones, outside, and in the workplace are elements which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Raising the bar for psychological damage, boredom isn’t an appealing subject. Therefore, is a symptom or effect of boredom preventing us from saying “I can” from “I can’t’? As human beings we also have both inbuilt and learnt mechanisms to regulate meaning in the face of boredom.[8] From the outset, there are a myriad of ways to understand [9] it. It’s relevantly complex and dull all at once.

References

[1] Anderson, Ben. 2021. “Affect and critique: A politics of boredom*.” 39, no. 2 (April). https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758211002998.

[2] "Ibid."

[3] van den Berg, Marguerite, and Bruce O'Neill. 2017. “Rethinking the class politics of boredom.” The Aesthetics of Urban Post-Fordist Labour Markets, (July).

[4] "Ibid."

[5] Wikipedia. 2020. “Affect (philosophy).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(philosophy).

[6] Danckert, James, and John Eastwood. 2020. “The Politics of Boredom.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-engaged-mind/202010/the-politics-boredom.

[7] Quesada, George G. n.d. “The Culture of Boredom.” https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004427495_005.

[8] "Ibid." [6]

[9] Clare, Ralph. 2012. “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King."” Studies in the Novel 44, no. 4 (Winter). https://www.jstor.org/stable/23408629.