A three-part exploration of boredom. Part 1, here, presents a brief history of the condition, part 2 and and part 3 explore modern and postmodern boredom more deeply and present the radical means by which to be free of it.
A Brief History of Tedium
The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse. To amuse themselves, they hit upon the notion of building a tower so high that it would reach the sky. This notion is just as boring as the tower was high and is a terrible demonstration of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then they were dispersed around the world, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And what consequences this boredom had: humankind stood tall and fell far…
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Boredom is solipsism, an inability to participate in meaningful experience. Consciousness becomes severed from the quality of the moment, making it impossible to feelingly respond to, meaningfully think about or act upon the world as it is, rather than how it merely appears to be on the screen of the personal mind and in the cauldron of personal emotions. The subjective I becomes trapped, here, witnessing an objective world, there. The self, turned upon itself, becomes confused, frantically anxious and, sooner or later, numb, passionless, the world it drifts through drained of reality, vitality, even of colour and taste, like a television screen sinking into a pond.
We can trace the catastrophic rupture between the conscious I and the quality of the moment back to the dawn of civilisation, around ten thousand years ago, when self first radically split subjective experience from objective nature1 and began informing itself and commanding others, creating a world which simultaneously protected self from a now threatening world, while at the same time frustrating and disheartening the same self, which no longer felt at home in that world. The consequences of this radical subject-object schism were dire — alienation, contention, corruption, sadness, existential fear and… borrrrredom.
And so tedium did not begin, as the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or cynically claims, with the spiritual fatigue of wanton gods, but with the self-domestication of man (who then, from his confinement, projected a boring God as the ultimate cause of it all). Just as only domesticated animals exhibit signs of boredom, so only domesticated people do. With domestication came compulsory work—a word which has meant suffering since the invention of monocultural, monotonous agriculture—and the elite idleness that such work paid for. Slaves, peasants and indentured drones do not write books, so we can only imagine the exhausting drudgery of their working lives,2 but the weary pain of elite tedium soon appeared in the historical record, in ancient Judea3 and Greece,4 and then in the far more boring civilisation of ancient Rome.
Solipsism is never total and so the forms of misery it generates vary in intensity and personality, just as varieties of madness do. Nevertheless, there is no question that the spiritual exhaustion of Seneca’s correspondent, Serenus, suffering from ‘the dullness of a soul that lies torpid amid abandoned hopes’ or Lucretius’ elite landowners, ‘addled and dizzy’, heavy of mind and heart,5 are both locally-inflected forms of the same draining misery that has haunted civilised man from the beginning of domesticated slavery to the present day. One of the reasons that most extraordinary documents of Roman life, Petronius’s Satyricon, is so fascinating to us today, is because its portrayal of Roman satiety rings so familiar to a world which goes to the same hysterical lengths to relieve its boredom.
We can chart the progress of tedium from Rome to the present day through the development of the technology which spread and sustained it. Far and away the most significant invention in the early story of boredom was literacy, which enabled man to magnify his influence on the objective world, but at a catastrophic cost to his subjectivity, which became conditioned by literacy6 into a learning, owning, remembering and calculating thing among other things, knowledge objects which one could now grasp in a manner that had been, in pre-civilised societies, impossible, unthinkable. Knowledge and power no longer existed in society at all, certainly not in people, but in abstract codices, or books, which had to be learnt or mastered; a boring experience, or at least far more boring than the inspiration, conversation and action that orality privileged.7
Boredom re-appeared in the historical record a few centuries later as the spiritual affliction of acedia that haunted early Christian monks confined in monastic institutions. This boredom was ‘a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind’ that caused anchorites to ‘look anxiously this way and that, sigh that none of [their] brethren come to seem [them]… and frequently gaze up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting.’8 It is not that these desert mystics simply had nothing useful to do, but that, as with Roman elites and Greek intellectuals, they had, through institutional confinement, severed their connection with culture and nature (including their own bodies, which had become a source of shame) opening up a meaningless void that the ‘noonday devil’ could slip into.
Notwithstanding the increasingly prison-like confinement of monastic life and the repressive power of the Church, the fall of Rome radically loosened the grip that highly-literate institutionalised technique, and its alienating effect on human consciousness, had on Europe, allowing for a far less boring existence than what had passed and what was to come. The filthy, riotous, honest, uncertain and terrifying middle-ages had dawned. There was, at the start of the medieval period, even a lively animist element to the early Church, which often recognised divinity in a natural world that would, as the high medieval period turned to face modernity, lose its enchantment and become once again a collection of mere things which human beings had a divine mandate to manage.
With the birth of the modern state, boredom as we know it today reappeared, now as the condition known as ‘ennui’, an affliction which struck inhabitants of the new, increasingly hyper-rational, polities that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, specifically in the first truly modern state, seventeenth century France. The boredom of French elites and intellectuals was not just the tedium vitae of civilised elites that had also haunted, amongst others, the courts of China, Inca, Baghdad and Spain. A new element of uselessness had entered the lives of French nobles, now completely under the thumb of the all-powerful Sun King, and of French intellectuals, who, with the appearance of modern science, and the immense distance it now created between a subjective world of useless quality and an objective world of useful quantity, had almost no practical influence on society.9
The glory days of the French empire also saw a rise in another feature of boredom, sexual deviance. In the eighteenth century, French libertine literature was filled with anthropomophized clitorises, detailed accounts of foot fetishes, and discussions of the pleasures of anal penetration. One of the fathers of the modern sexual revolution, the feminist, socialist and atheist Marquis de Sade, was born from this milieu. He seems as extreme to us now as he did to his contemporaries, but the ground of his philosophy, that the only meaning in life is in pursuing sexual gratification to its limit, has been the foundation of the lives of the bored ever since. De Sade took profanity to the same logical limits that our feminist, socialist and atheist society has. ‘Everyone,’ as Aldous Huxley’s socalist dystopians remind us, ‘belongs to everyone else.’10
Ennui, the beginning of boredom as we know it today, was thus a consequence of the hyper-rational Enlightenment. Before the seventeenth century the inner reality of writers, artists and mystics was still believed to somehow correspond to the external universe. They had, to put it simply, something to do in the world. The rise of the mechanistic universe changed that, severing as it did insight from outcome (and poetry from philosophy) making the lives of artists rich with subjective meaning but poor with objective application, a poverty which manifested in their lives as boredom. ‘Ennui [was] virtually omnipresent among Enlightenment thinkers’,11 just as it was, increasingly, for ordinary people, whose lives were becoming more and more ordered, rationalised and domesticated, their instincts for spontaneity suppressed by socially-imposed restrictions on spontaneity and by a new premium on self-control,12 now a prerequisite for entering ‘polite society’.
Just as the first scientific revolution of ancient Greece had, largely through the media of literacy and financial numeracy, introduced new forms of anguish and confusion into the world, so the vastly more influential second scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment led to an erosion of individual value and unconstrained quality, neither of which can be detected with reason. Society became ruled by intellectuals with an obsessive mania for order that eradicated variety (such as the massive variety of languages, measurements systems and so on that existed in the middle-ages), physicality (now, along with ‘filth’ considered obscene) and moral freedom (repugnant to early modern rationalists of the puritan age). With rational thought at the helm such qualities and values became arbitrary, the world became boring,13 and men became, as Kierkegaard was to realise two centuries later, less passionately interested in their own existence, and therefore less able to decisively, realise it in the world, which was then abandoned to mere reason—not to mention to mere technology.
Domestication, institutionalisation, rationality and technology thus progressed together, resulting in more and more boredom. The ‘technologies’ of agriculture, literacy and money led to the rational organisation of society by institutionalised bureaucrats, which in turn led to the rise of cities, further institutionalisation, further technological development and so on until we reach the hyper-domesticating, hyper-institutionalising, hyper-rationalising industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, which isolated masses of men and women from existence, creating the conditions for a secular, democratic boredom that would, as Baudelaire predicted, swallow all of mankind in an immense yawn.14
Again technology provided the foundation for a new, even more terrible, form of boredom. The total experience of the primal panjective self, one with the context, was, by the time we reach the early nineteenth century in Europe, fractured and frustrated by a devastating cluster of related social developments and technological inventions. These included the clock, the gallery, the factory, the train, the camera and the modern city, all of which widened the already appalling rift between subjectivity and objectivity, making it practically impossible for the self to freely act, directly perceive, meaningfully think or emotionally respond to a reality which had thus became unbearably boring.
Machines of Tedium
Through the invention of the clock, time became standardised and homogenised. It no longer responded to mood and atmosphere, into which it once dissolved in direct unselfconscious experience and instinct, but became instead a ruthless standard that all living people and processes had to subjugate themselves to. This opened up a painful, spontaneity-corrupting distance between experience and instinct. One had to order one’s life now not by the needs of the body, or the demands of the situation (the weather,15 for example, or the seasons), but to the call of the clock, the calendar, the schedule and the programme. Time was no longer a quality to bodily respond to but a thing to be abstractly measured and correctly—not to mention obsessively—ordered. The ‘timeline’ of the contemporary social media landing page is no different, in this respect, to the ‘timeline’ of the interpretive museum panel or the planned ‘timeline’ of the committee, council or corporation. All are violent attacks on the flesh of time, opening up unhealable wounds, the constant pain from which we call boredom.
In the museum and the gallery culture was reordered into ‘history’, each room containing an era, a period, an epoch, which no longer had anything to do with the real lived world of those who wandered listlessly through them.16 Each section of the museum displayed things and people torn from context, forming ‘a gapless sequence in a hypercultural space’,17 which made them simultaneously intensely interesting, like a silver cube spinning in the middle of a hotel foyer, yet in not belonging to the context, with its space, its ‘sitedness’, its simplicity, the gallery experience became, at the same time, intensely boring, just like everything else, rootless, homeless, pointless and evacuated of aura.18 What point does a painting in a gallery or a bowl in a museum serve? Nothing other than to be stared at, which destroys its qualitative — which is to say irrational — union with context. If you doubt this, ask yourself how you feel to be stared at. Museum paintings are as sad as strippers.
In the new world of the factory and the office there was no freedom to consciously attend to one’s work, which became, thereby, extremely boring. One was forced to violently conform to movements, rhythms, processes and rational objects which were ripped from context, and therefore from consciousness, in order to serve the productive demands of capital. This forced, hyper-focus on objective things eradicated passionate engagement with one’s work, which had absolutely no place in either the worker’s factory or the manager’s office and had to be replaced with an imposed compulsion — the threat of discipline (through unemployment, poverty, reduced status, etc.). The lower-class factory worker and the middle-class office worker were thus forced, if they had enough time and energy for reverie, into isolated and therefore solipsistic reveries. The desperate boredom of on-the-job daydreaming, which resurfaces in dreams as a menacing otherness the worker cannot escape from, because he is it; he has become an object just like all the other objects he has to labour on.
The factory and the office forced the same constraints upon the self as all the other new institutions of modernity, the prison, the madhouse, the hospital, the office and the school, all of which compelled the individual to conform to a series of interlocking and ever more rigidly encoded and enforced rituals, or cliches of thought and action, further stretching the gulf between the witnessing I and the present moment into to a desolate, desperate lacuna between a past that is irrevocably lost and a future that is unattainably distant. The details differ, but the base-experience of prisoners, inmates, patients, clerks and students, then as now, is the same, a core frustration, of being reduced to a manageable ‘case’, a deathly boredom that can only be alleviated by breaking the rules or by escaping into a dream world.
Over time, modern institutions localised themselves into the immense, interlocking network we call the city, a high-tech über-institution which, like its prototypical antecedents in history, was [unconsciously] designed to ‘protect’ man from nature and from human nature, thus degrading both and turning them into worrying enemies. The city first appeared in its totalising modern form around two hundred years ago, when individuals who had been uprooted from their natural homes,19 found themselves without family and friends, without nature and without enchantment. What had once been a playful desire to pay attention to the whole moment, was now a nerve-wracking compulsion to pay attention to things, to adverts, rules, regulations, to one’s own appearance, and to hyper-stimulating porn, all of which transformed the whole into an alien and alienating simulacrum, and transformed those who are forced to live within it into the characterless, unpeople we call ‘citizens’.
Transport, in the form of the train, became as alienating, and therefore as boring, as every other aspect of modernity. The train radically ruptured the traveller from context—from the immediate landscape, from the weather and from fellow travellers—creating a disembodied pseudo-experience which sucked time of meaning that then had to be reintroduced with time-killing reading, games, screens and so on (enjoyment from which sometimes convinces people they enjoy travelling by train). Travelling by train without such distraction became, and still is, far more boring and unreal than transport by foot, or by horse and carriage.20 As John Ruskin wrote:
Going by railroad I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely “being sent” to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel…. real knowledge is acquired of whatever it is the object of travelling to learn, and a certain sublimity given to all places, so attained, by the true sense of the spaces of the earth that separate them. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad, as one who loved eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a pill.21
Trains seem to be peaceful and humane, but only in comparison to driving a car. Quite apart from the role that cars play in polluting the air and the land, tearing up communities and throwing places of consumption, production and reproduction ever further from each other, thus paralysing the human body, the actual experience of driving — hurtling around in a metal box trying to avoid other metal boxes flying at you at unnatural speeds, demands an intense focus, on a screen (the windscreen) that obliterates conscious reverie. This is why people who love cars are so stupendously boring — but only marginally more boring than people who love trains.22
What would eventually become the most deforming influence on man’s subjectivity was the camera. The photograph froze living quality, which painters could still express, and began to colonise time itself, replacing living sensate experience with a frozen accumulation of spectacular, spatial symbols (delivered to a layer of emulsion not through the receptive body of the artist, but at the press of a switch). Over time, and with the development of film, the image slowly reshaped the attentive speaker, or the responsive audience, into an abstracted starer of symbolic foreign objects which could be designed by the system, for the system, thus imprisoning man so completely in his self that it would become, in our times, impossible to even imagine egress, let alone find it.23 As Owen Barfield wrote, in 1977,
We live in a camera civilization. Our entertainment is camera entertainment. Our holidays are camera holidays. We make them so by paying more attention to the camera we brought with us than to the waterfall we are pointing it at. Our science is almost entirely a camera science. . . . and it is already becoming self-evident to camera man that only camera words have any meaning. Even our poetry has become, for the most part, camera poetry. So much of it consists of those pointedly paradoxical surface contrasts between words and between random thoughts and feelings, arranged in the complicated perspective of the poet’s own often rather meagre personality. Where, one asks, has the music gone? Where has the wind gone that sweeps the music into being, the hagion pneuma, the ruach elohim? It really does feel as though the camera had won hands down and smashed the harp to pieces.24
The world that dawned at the close of the eighteenth century thus began to completely sever the connection between a superficially interesting but illusory subjective self and a superficially real but deathly boring, and, thanks to technology, increasingly powerful, objective world; powerful because it had started to colonise subjectivity, robbing the subject of it power to meaningfully sense, act, think and feel. Depth, in such a divided existence, along with conviviality, meaning, spontaneity and surprise, could still be found, but history was now bound for nowhere, a high-tech unplace so boring that its inhabitants would rather die than drag their exhausted selves through it. This wasteland of abject tedium, in which nothing wild ever happens, to a hyper-domestic mass of hollow automatons who are forced to flee from their boredom into its spiritually scalding opposame — fun — is where we all live.
Well, not quite all of us.
Part 2, looks at the modern war waged on attention and the modernist revolt and Part 3 addresses the postmodern prison and its surprising exit. They are for paying guests, because I need money for fags and booze.
Which resulted in, or was concomitant with, other conceptual splits we are familiar with today, including ‘work and play’, ‘sacred and profane’, ‘nature and super-nature’ and ‘nature and culture’, all of which were unknown to pre-civilised people. See Phillip Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture and Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe.
Putting aside the fact that physical labour tends to crush awareness of the tedium it entails.
Ecclesiastes expresses what we would call boredom—‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.’ ‘All I laboured to do was vanity and vexation of spirit.’ ‘I hated life because all my work was grievous to me.’—but it’s really in the humourless God of the Jews that the boredom of the Bronze age is most apparent.
Albeit sparsely;
That [terms which might be translated as ‘boredom’ were] rarely used, and that the mental state was rarely described or alluded to, does allow us to note a tendency to ignore the emotion. Perhaps judging it trivial, Greeks of these periods did not dignify it with frequent reference.
Peter Toohey, Some Ancient Notions of Boredom.
The mind does not tolerate home, solitude, or the walls of a room, and does not enjoy seeing that it has been left to itself. This is the source of that boredom and dissatisfaction, of the wavering of a mind that finds no rest anywhere, and the sad and spiritless endurance of one’s leisure; and particularly when one is ashamed to confess the reasons for these feelings, and diffidence drives its torments inwards, the desires, confined in a narrow space from which there is no escape, choke one-another; hence come grief and melancholy and the thousand fluctuations of an uncertain mind, held in suspense by early hopes and then reduced to sadness once they fail to materialize; this causes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to keep them occupied, and also the bitterest feelings of jealousy of other men’s successes.
Seneca, On the Tranquility of the mind.
Often, addled and dizzy, you don’t even know what’s wrong –
You find yourself besieged at every turn by a whole throng
Of cares, and drift on shifting currents of uncertainty.
Men feel a heaviness upon their minds, it’s plain to see,
That weighs them down. If they could grasp the cause of this tedium,
This heap of misery and care that hunkers on the heart,
They would not lead the lives we see they do for the most part,
None knowing what he wants, each ever seeking a change of place —
As if he could lay his burden down by travelling through space.Often a man who’s sick and tired of his own hearth will roam
From his roomy mansion, only to come suddenly back home
Because he feels no better when he’s somewhere else. He heads
For his country villa, driving his imported thoroughbreds
Hell-for-leather, as though to save a house on fire. And yet
The fellow starts to yawn the very moment he has set
Foot in the door, or falls in a heavy sleep, seeking to drown
In oblivion. Or even wants to hotfoot back to town!
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
See also Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans for an account of the anguished tedium of Roman life.
And by money. See Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind.
See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy.
This is a quote from John Cassius, a fourth century Christian ascetic. Here is a fuller description from his contemporary, Evagrius Ponticus;
The demon of acedia is called the ‘noonday demon’. It is the most oppressive of all demons. It attacks a hermit at about the fourth hour and besieges his soul until the eighth hour. First this demon makes the sun appear sluggish and immobile, just as if the length of the day were fifty hours. Then it causes the hermit to look continually at the windows and forces him to step out of his cell and to gaze at the sun. This is to see how far it still is from the ninth hour. And it forces him to look around, here and there, to see whether any of his brethren are near. In addition the demon makes him dislike his place, his life itself, and the work of his hands. It makes him think that he has lost the affection of his brethren and that there is no one to comfort him. If, during these days, anybody annoyed the hermit, the demon would cause this to increase his hatred. It stirs the hermit also to yearn for different places in which he can easily find what is necessary for his life and carry on a much less difficult and more profitable profession. It is not on account of the locality, the demon suggests, that one pleases God. He can be worshipped everywhere. To these thoughts the demon adds the memory of the hermit's family and of his former way of life. It highlights the paltry length of his lifetime, holding before the hermit's eyes all the hardships of his ascetic life. The demon employs all his wiles to cause the hermit to leave his cell and to flee from the racecourse of his vocation.
Pascal, in many ways the prototypical thinker of the French enlightenment, was much concerned, in his Pensées with the matter of Boredom. ‘Man’s condition,’ he wrote, is nothing more than ‘Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.’
Boredom. Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.
They have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness. They have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement. These two contrary instincts give rise to a confused plan buried out of sight in the depths of their soul, which leads them to seek rest by way of activity and always to imagine that the satisfaction they miss will come to them once they overcome certain obvious difficulties and can open the door to welcome rest.
All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Elizabeth Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, Boredom and Modernity. There is an argument that from La Rochefoucauld onwards much of the literature of the newly industrialised West was a running commentary on boredom. Boredom certainly does play a central role in the plot of many modern masterpieces; A Hero of Our Time, Bleak House, Anna Karenina, Oblamov, Madame Bovery, Against Nature and Ulysses amongst others. Jane Austen’s Emma, for example, is bored witless, which is why she engages in all the futile matchmaking which drives the plot.
See Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process.
Consider the greatest Enlightenment thinker, Emmanuel Kant… repressed, meticulous, fastidious, dry, sexless and totally abstracted from his own body.
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil.
Many languages still have the same word for ‘time’ and ‘weather’.
J.J. Haladyn, Boredom and Art.
Byung-Chul Han, Hyperculture.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art. We should add here that contemporary galleries and museums do allow ordinary people to see art that, in many cases, was locked away in private homes and inaccessible retreats—a boon that I for one have taken full and grateful advantage of—but as with so much of the democratising benefit of modernity, it essentially solved a problem caused by a market system that had, and has, in no way overcome. What’s more, the price of being able to enjoy art is far too high; the system that gives man great art with one hand, deprives him of the ability to create it for himself with the other.
The same thing happened in ancient history—slaves could only be turned into useful things if they were stripped of context. The difference between then and now is that the modern world demanded whole populations—finally, even, the whole population of the Earth—be made homeless.
J.J. Haladyn, Boredom and Art.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters. My emphasis.
Train-spotting: the desire to be able to understand just a little part of the world, a manifestly controllable part. There are train-spotters everywhere.
Brain Eno, A Year of Swollen Appendices
Owen Barfield, The Camera and the Harp.