Science on Boredom

"It cannot be helped: boredom is not simple. We do not escape boredom ... with a gesture of impatience or rejection" (Roland Barthes, 1973)

The rhetoric of boredom thus gives a critical edge to Hegel's writings on Dutch art. Indeed, Heidegger would later declare that boredom was the fundamental mood of modernity. Subsequent critical studies of boredom have argued that this mood is a variable and historically specific symptom. Goodstein defines boredom in terms of the democratisation of scepticism, a widespread loss of certainty about the transcendental meaningfulness of everyday existence. She emphasises the historicity of a mood that seems to defy the passing of time, and contends that discursive awareness of anomie as an endemic social experience first emerged in the seventeenth century. Expressing the alienation and estrangement of people in secular urban commercial centres, the rhetoric of boredom accompanies the freedoms brought about by the fragmentation of inherited systems of value and external social controls. The discourse of boredom, in other words exposes the limitations of new freedoms, especially the loss of transcendent meaning. Both Goodstein and Reinhard Kuhn have analysed writings on boredom from the17th to the early 20th Century.

[...] Heidegger describes these characteristics as: being left empty and being held limbo. For Heidegger, boredom is a threshold experience; it takes its victims temporally out of the world and holds them in an unsettling state of limbo in which being and time are suspended or drawn out and thus made conspicuous. Langeweile, the German term for boredom, conveys this sense of the lengthening of time and also connotes the sensation of homesickness or world alienation. Heidegger urges his interlocutors not to fight boredom by killing time, filling it with pastimes and diversions. Rather, boredom should be awakened and approached with a listening attitude, for its emptiness holds great potential, offering 'a space in which to play'. This indeterminate space, Heidegger contends, opens opportunities for introspective reflection on everyday subjective experience. Suspending the flow of secular time, the experience of profound boredom prompts awareness of time itself, potentially allowing the bored subject to situate the narrow subjective time of mundane existence within the whole of time.

p.1012 in Boredom's Threshold: Dutch Realism by Angela Vanhalen. Association of Art Historians 2012.