Boredom and Art: Passions Of The Will To Boredom

By Julian Jason Haladyn

Boredom and Art examines the use of boredom as a strategy in modern and contemporary art to resist or frustrate the effects of consumerism and capitalism. This book traces the emergence of what Haladyn terms the will to boredom in which artists, writers and philosophers actively attempt to use the lack of interest inherent in the state of being 'bored' to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: ‘a threshold of great deeds’ in Walter Benjamin’s memorable wording. It is this conception of boredom as a positive experience of modern subjectivity that is the main critical position of Haladyn's study, in which he proposes that boredom is used by artists as a form of aesthetic resistance that, at its most positive, is the will to boredom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781782799993

Book preview

1975

Introduction

The modern conception of boredom develops at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, within the same time-period as the establishment of the nation-state and the growth of industrialization and consumerism. Unlike previous social afflictions associated with select groups and individuals within cultures or even as a phenomenon of privilege typically restricted to people of specific classes – such as horror loci, taedium vitae, acedia and melancholy¹ – boredom is an experience open to all citizens of modernity. In her important study Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein convincingly argues for what she calls the democratization of boredom in which the conditions of mass leisure allowed an initially elitist discourse of subjective disaffection to gradually take hold in popular culture, so that by the early twentieth century the experience of ennui had become truly universal (99). The succession of affections or conditions that ends with modern boredom arguably forms a genealogy of human malaise, with each registering deficiencies of social experience within a particular historical period, be it from a moral or psychological, mundane or philosophical perspective.

From this point of view, being ‘bored’ is just our way of naming the present manifestation of this discontent. Quite distinct from any early malady of this kind, however, is what Walter Benjamin describes as the epidemic proportions of boredom as a specifically modern phenomenon directly related to mass culture. It is not simply a matter of immediacy that distinguishes this condition from others of its kind, but the fact that people of all classes, races and genders within modern cultures can share in this experience without substantive difference. The boredom of a housewife or factory worker is no less significant than that of a politician or philosopher.² In fact, the most compelling attributes of this condition are precisely those that give it such a democratizing affect to which every individual is susceptible – and inevitably experiences it as a consistent and often unavoidable part of life in the modern world.

As such, studies of boredom are faced with the inescapable problem of attempting to differentiate and even reconcile individualized attributes of this affliction with those that are more collective or social. Being bored is regarded primarily as the private experience of a given person, yet it is one shared generally by a multitude of people – so many in fact that it can be viewed as an assumed response indicative of anyone who is not fully engaged or, more precisely, entertained at a given moment or by a given object or event. On the one hand, it would be a misnomer to claim that such an experience is completely subjective, raising the question of why boredom is so culturally diffuse. On the other hand, to believe that a subject’s boring encounter with an object or situation remains entirely external appears equally absurd, particularly considering the profoundly personal affects and effects of this condition. As a discursively articulated phenomenon, Goodstein explains, boredom is at once objective and subjective, emotion and intellectualization – not just a response to the modern world but also an historically constituted strategy for coping with its discontents (3). This borderland of discontented experience that the term boredom attempts to communicate resides firmly in the back-and-forth relationship between the subject and the world: it exists as a corollary or by-product of the specifically modern visions of human existence. In this capacity, the bored subject is one driven to seek a level of personal and cultural engagement that is not present, one whose interactions with the world are, or at least continually are made to feel, historically and culturally absent or nullified, in which life appears without purpose or meaning as a result of fixed, ready-made ways of living and thinking.

We see instantly a correlation between the emergence of modernization, most notably the mass-production of the industrial revolution, and the onset of boredom in modernity. Much of the literature on boredom highlights the relationship between our consumer-based culture and the apparent decrease in people’s attention spans, which in all likelihood is the result of the promotion of disposable objects and constantly changing interests (often treated positively by referring to them as ‘trends’). As a result, our desires are typically satiated only temporarily when treated to new forms of stimuli. We expect to be constantly entertained, so much so that we judge every aspect of our daily lives in terms of how it holds our interests – experiences that do not promise immediate engagement are quickly labeled ‘boring’. Arthur Schopenhauer articulated this sentiment in The World as Will and Representation when he described life as a pendulum swinging to and fro between pain and boredom, between the suffering caused by our inability to accomplish or hold onto our desire and the boredom of lacking any accomplishable desire (312). It is our desire or will that is the target of consumerism, which aims to make us want what we do not have and reciprocally to not want what we already have.

It is important to note that the concept of ‘boredom’ comes into existence with its doppelganger term ‘interest’ – these two affective states, in a sense, representing the two key poles of the modern subject. To be bored or interested, boring or interesting, registers the functioning of this will in and through acts of perceiving the world from an increasingly individualized perspective. The preoccupation with the subject or self is an early precept of modernity, particularly in the shift from the Enlightenment into Romanticism – a transition that is examined in the first few chapters of this book.

It is in relation to the overwhelming demands placed on the individual within modern culture through, most notably, the rise of industrialization and consumerism that the epidemic of boredom must be understood. In its most affirmative and willful state, the experience of being bored goes beyond this act of (personal) retreat and becomes an active position of (aesthetic) refusal that approaches boredom as a form of will. It is the creative and passionately affective potential of subjectivity enacted through this will to boredom that challenges the perceived meaninglessness of lived existence within modernity. We must therefore consider boredom not in opposition to interest, as is the common-sense interpretation, but instead as a possible source for subjectively creating interest where previously none existed. Stated differently, it is the interest of boredom that compels us to question our existing vision of the world and to recognize – through the experience of an absent or missed experience – the limitations we impose on ourselves through our conceptions and definitions of reality. The problem of boredom is not the experience of a lack of interest, which speaks to one’s failed ability to be fascinated or feel a connection with one’s life; boredom in its affirmative state functions to establish just such a link. Rather, it is through a profound lack of fulfillment that subjective will is confronted with its own limit, forced to extend itself – beyond mere interest, yet dependent upon a passionate interest – to the extremity of its power.

The ‘boredom’ we are discussing is clearly more than its common or colloquial usage, the term defining not just a minor personal problem but also and more importantly a subject’s experiential lack of meaning within modern life. It defines a borderland of affective experiences that confronts us with, rather than distracting us from, the crisis of meaning in modern culture. As such, what boredom in fact describes is the subjective lack that is at once the cause and result of being bored. Boredom calls upon us, inciting us to look into this meaninglessness that refuses to give a purpose or a final goal to life, leaving us at the mercy of our own subjective causality – Rodolphe Gasché explains the ‘subjective’ as the understanding’s reappropriation of what happens when it is at a loss, and reason becomes animated, but the objects still have to be accounted for (33) – as we futilely attempt to avoid feeling the loss of our very being. In this way, my interest in boredom stems from its potential as a manifestation of the human condition, one in which we are compelled to acknowledge the subjective nature of our existence and, in its most affirmative state, to create meaning out of the meaninglessness of life in this merely subjective world. Seen in this way the experience of being bored can no longer be understood as an aberration within an otherwise interesting life, passed over as a trivial or inconsequential moment of detachment. Instead, boredom functions as an integral component in the very fabric of human life and knowledge within modernity – a condition that is fundamentally connected to the question of will.

While many initial responses to boredom were negative, we see among the artists, writers and philosophers associated with the modernist avant-garde an active attempt to use this lack of interest to challenge people. Instead of accepting the prescribed meanings of life given to us by consumer or mass culture, one based on the perpetual need for the ever-new, boredom represents the possibility of creating meaning: a threshold of great deeds in Benjamin’s memorable wording. At its most affirmative, this subjective stance is the will to boredom: an aesthetic condition of modernity by which the subject, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, judges the relationship of self and world through a question of will – understood in the Nietzschean sense of willing as creating. It is this conception of boredom as a potentially positive experience of modern subjectivity that I propose in this study, with the more specified aim of arguing for the fundamental significance of the will to boredom within modern and contemporary cultural discourse.

1

An Eye for Boredom

For although everyone is commonly convinced that the ideas that we have in our thoughts are completely like the objects from which they proceed, I know of no compelling argument for this. Quite the contrary, I know of many observations which cast doubt upon it.

— René Descartes (The World and Other Writings, 3)

Within modernity the question of subjective will manifests itself most powerfully as a visual impulse, both produced by and a product of the representation of the world we experience. The primacy of vision within modern culture is undeniable – popular culture from the 19th century onward representing the most obvious and pervasive example, based as it is on the excessive employment of visuality as a means of attracting and holding peoples’ attention, of keeping them perpetually interested. Our lives are mediated through an endless array of visual stimuli, still and moving, obvious and subtle; from advertisements to movies, television to the internet, our consumer-based culture surrounds us with images that define the bulk of our experiences of the world. While a number of 20th - and 21st-century thinkers have been critical of this ocularcentrist view, the fact remains that Descartes’ belief that sight is the most comprehensive and noblest of the human senses remains true today. My examination of boredom therefore begins at the source of this visual impulse: the functioning of the eye as a form of mediation that stands between self and world.

The eye’s mediating presence is the reason for Schopenhauer’s claim that we do not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth (3). I may want to believe that the sun I see is completely like the sun that exists in reality but, to borrow Descartes’ words, I know of no compelling argument for this. This modern understanding of vision developed out of the Johannes Kepler’s ground-breaking 1604 Optics, in which he proposes a conception of the eye as separate from what it sees, as a willful interpreter of reality – an important model that I will draw upon for articulating the visual framework for will of modern boredom. However, before considering Kepler’s accomplishment it is necessary to briefly examine the prevailing optical theories he built upon, which pertain not only to the functioning of the eye but also, and more broadly, to the image of the world made possible through this early model of our vision.

Since Antiquity all of the major theories of vision, even when contradicting each other in terms of the nature of how we see, generally accepted that the human eye is an unmediated experience of the world. Whether vision is accomplished because the object in some fashion reaches out to the eye (intermission) or the eye is understood as reaching out and grasping the object (extramission), the act of perception is in both cases based on some form of direct contact that links the person looking with what they see. Even when light became the accepted means of experiencing vision, the light rays that traveled from object to eye again are understood as facilitating a one-to-one relationship experienced without mediation, since what we see and what is seen are assumed to be the same.

The most important articulation of this understanding of vision can be found in the monumental Book of Optics by the Arabic scientist Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen or Alhacen in its Latinized form). This book represented a significant advancement beyond all pre-existing optical theories, becoming the basis for subsequent approaches to optics up to and including Kepler. One particular feature that Ibn al-Haytham develops is, as David Lindberg articulates it, the one-to-one correspondence between points in the visual field and points in the eye, the resulting visual pyramid consisting of rays that travel in an uninterrupted line toward the centre of the eye and hence reach the glacial humour without refraction, except inside the eye itself where the outermost rays are refracted in such a way as to avoid the achievement of an apex that would result in an inverted image (73; 85).

This theory of vision was instrumental in the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance. In his celebrated 1435 On Painting Leon Battista Alberti used the visual pyramid as the basis for envisioning the world as ‘realistic’ – specifically within painting, although the larger conceptual ramifications of this mode of seeing are still being felt today. Let us imagine the rays, Alberti writes, like extended very fine threads gathered tightly in a bunch at one end, going back together inside the eye where lies the sense of sight (40). There is no question in Alberti’s text that the rays connect us to what we see, a relationship that is, as the metaphor of the very fine threads indicates, seen in material (object-based) terms. The canonization of this visual pyramid in the methodology of perspective solidified a direct and unmediated relationship of self to world in a readily self-evident manner, consistently employed within Renaissance paintings, by positioning the subject as the primary point of determining the reality of vision. In a vision of the world dominated by perspective the human becomes the measure of all things seen.

The eye’s perception of objects in the visual pyramid that converges inside that eye is understood as occurring naturally (without help or intervention) in much the same way as the formation of an image in a camera obscura, which, especially following Leonardo da Vinci, became a well used metaphor for the human eye. This idea of the eye as a camera obscura was popularized in Giambattista della Porta’s 1558 (with a second and more complete edition in 1589) Natural Magic, a text of considerable influence on Kepler and other theorists at the beginning of the 17th century. In this volume della Porta makes the important suggestion of adding a lens to the camera obscura in place of a simple pinhole to enhance the quality of the image projected into the dark chamber, a modification that would have lasting consequences to especially the development of the photographic camera.

Athanasius Kircher’s 1646 The Great Art of Light and Shadow includes the now famous illustration of a room-size camera obscura that is an ideal visualization of the unmediated eye: inside the optical device the world is delivered to the (miniature) waiting spectator. There is no question that what is seen inside the camera obscura is a reflection of the world outside the device – any deviations, such as the reversal and inversion of the image projected into the dark room, are considered a problem of the camera and not a real difference between the world and its image. And similar to the presence of this metaphorical interiorized perceiving subject, the eye was understood as internally experiencing an image of the correct orientation so that again there is a fundamental one-to-one relation of the eye or self and the visual field of the world. The eye so conceived became the nexus for knowing the world through resemblances. It is the perceived similarities connecting self to world that form the basis of a meaningful existence; or, stated differently, meaning is the experience of seeing yourself reflected in the world around you. Like the world seen in a camera obscura, this conception of vision is predicated on what Alexandre Koyré describes as the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole (a whole in which the hierarchy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being, rising from dark, heavy and imperfect earth to the higher and higher perfection of the stars and heavenly spheres) (2). Such a hierarchical model determined a necessary equivalence between the objects of our vision and how we see them, both limitations representing the point at which similitude rather than providing knowledge simply reflects or folds back our own visions or ideas of the world – compelling us to see what we think we see.

The belief in the eye as a