Friday, September 21, 2007
"It is our duty," claims Lars Svendsen, "to live a life that torments us" (A Philosophy of Boredom, p. 146, Svendsen's emphasis). He recommends living with the problem of boredom rather than trying to escape it, overcome it, or solve it. To appreciate what he is saying we have to recognize that in life as this Norwegian academic knows it such things as living with malaria, for example, are simply not on the table.
Boredom would seem to force us to contend with a loss of meaning in life. However, Svendsen questions whether anything has really been lost in boredom. "An awareness of loss does not guarantee that anything has actually been lost, and therefore does not guarantee either that there is something–a time, meaning or experience–that has to be won back" (p. 136). So where does the sense of loss come from if it doesn't come from actually having lost something? Svendsen's explanation begins with the proposition that "I am the sum of all transgressions of myself, i.e., of all that I do" (p. 133). Boredom commences when these transgressions no longer function satisfactorily, and, in a gesture of self doubt or crisis, reflection turns upon the self in search of reasons, or a reason that could explain who one is. The search is in vain, and what one discovers as a reason for one's transgressions is an abyss, a foundation more contingent than what has been founded. This is both an awareness and a feeling. "What I then find is not a reason of any sort but an imprecise feeling that appears to be something that has always been with me. It is as if this feeling is me" (p. 134, Svendsen's emphasis). Svendsen's cultural insights–linking, for example, the emergence of boredom to the emergence of childhood (p. 149)–don't lead him away from taking a philosophical stance towards the problem of boredom. Boredom may be felt, but there is a sense in which he regards thinking as key to its genesis, and also key to the accomodation one should reach with boredom.
Svendsen recommends that we embrace loneliness, not self-centeredness, but loneliness (p. 144). His suggested accomodation with boredom, his tempered amor fati, is not completely grim. "In boredom an emptying takes place, and an emptiness can be a receptiveness, although it does not have to be it" (p. 142). Allowing the emptiness of boredom to become a receptiveness may be a matter of allowing oneself time to accumulate experience (p. 45).
The problem, first and foremost, lies in accepting that all that is given are small moments and that life offers a great deal of boredom between these moments. For life does not consist of moments but of time. The absence of the great Meaning does not, however, result in all meaning in life evaporating. A one-sided focusing on the absence of Meaning can overshadow all other meaning–and then the world really looks as if it has been reduced to rubble. A source of profound boredom is that we demand capital letters where we are obliged to make do with small ones.
(p. 154)
It was important for me to point out that living with malaria is not a concern for Svendsen because he offers a stark critique of utopianism that must be appreciated in the context of what he is not talking about, if it is be appreciated at all. He says, "A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the 'utopia' we are living in is boring" (p. 137). Further, he states that "all utopias seem to be deadly boring, because only that which is imperfect is interesting" (p. 138). I see a connection between imperfection and doing, or satisfactorily doing. What does it mean after all to do what has already been done? I have the impression that for Svendsen pre-Romantic cultures would have been satisfied to do what has already been done, taking meaning from tradition. I don't quite see it that way. I think meaning can be taken from doing what needs to be done, and it's more the superabundance of late capitalist production than a break with tradition that marks this particular problematization of doing. I question, then, whether doing should be equated with transgression. Many transgressions don't amount to doing, and perhaps under certain circumstances many activities don't amount to acting. Only by blinding oneself to this alienation–which is more than a thought of alienation but rather a broader set of conditions–can one begin to decouple boredom from idleness, as Svendsen has done. Svendsen opines that alienation is no longer an issue for intellectuals, either because alienation has ceased to exist, or because we are already so alienated that we cannot contrast alienation with anything. And he says that one cannot be alienated from a society that lacks social substance (p. 136). He doesn't then really explore the idea that we might be alienated from our own actions. The indifference of existential boredom, and also the sense of living in a "perfect," perfectly boring world suggest to me an alienated condition. But I'm not completely sure of that. I can't deny that Svendsen's skepticism of utopias resonates with me, and yet I think there is an enormous difference between living with imperfections and living with genuine torments. It would be more judicious to say that we have a duty to lead a life that troubles us from time to time, an obligation to jump off the raft of affective flatness and swim in the crowded waters. That we should accomodate some boredom may be sage advice, but a community of the chronically bored could surely do with some stirring up.
Labels: alienation, boredom, Svendsen
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
"Deprived of world," "weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside," "death infecting life," "the outside-of-meaning," "engulfed" in a loss "for want of the ability to name an object of desire": these are not the words of Lars Svendsen describing existential boredom, but rather Julia Kristeva describing abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982). There are some notable differences between the two. "Essentially different from 'uncaniness,' more violent too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory" (p. 5). If abjection differs from Unheimlichkeit, it nonetheless involves a rupture with the sense of place. "[T]he space that engrosses the deject [the one by whom the abject exists], the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic" (p. 8). The deject is a stray whose existential question is not "Who am I?" but "Where am I?"
"The abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that always already been lost" (p. 15, my emphasis). We might think of boredom as a kind of violence, something for which we would rather substitute dialogue, but boredom doesn't feel quite like a violence, not the way abjection does. The deject has swallowed up, instead of maternal love, "an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred" (p. 6). "The 'unconscious' contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established" (p. 7, Kristeva's emphasis). There is material here for an existential essay on the mood, the disposition, of dejection. Kristeva, however, draws us into the psychology of a condition and its literary and cultural elaborations, an essay on abjection.
Jacky Bowring asks, perspicaciously, whether loss has a form. I will ask, rather boringly by now, whether loss has a rhythm, and whether its rhythm could other than a brutal pulsative function. "The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth" (p. 9). So abjection has a pulse. It also becomes rhythm. Kristeva tells us that the abject is repeated. (I'll leave aside for the moment the problems of Kristeva's eternal return and of repetition;) One can bring abjection "into being a second time, and different from the original impurity. It is a repetition through rhythm and song, therefore through what is not yet, or no longer is 'meaning,' but arranges, defers, differntiates and organizes, harmonizes pathos, bile, warmth and enthusiasm" (p. 28).
Kristeva adopts a Freudian stance to the problem of abjection. She believes it causes a "sad analytic silence to hover above a strange, foreign discourse, which, strictly speaking, shatters verbal communication (made up of a knowledge and a truth that are nevertheless heard) by means of a device that mimics terror, enthusiasm, or orgy, and is more closely related to rhythm and song that it is to the World" (p. 30). The approach leads me outside, or rather off, my ambit, but I will let Kristeva call the tune because I am curious about this strange discourse more related to rhythm than to the world.
Labels: abjection, Bowring, Kristeva, pulsative function, rhythm, Svendsen, Unheimlichkeit
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Boredom is mainly . . . characterized by the present, or rather: boredom knows neither past nor future, whereas melancholy is characterized by a longing for a time that once existed (or possibly a future that is hoped for). Using Kierkegaard's terminology, we can see that the melancholic is someone who lives in the memory, i.e., someone who repeats backwards, while true repetition takes place forwards. Neither repetition backwards nor forwards is applicable to boredom, whose very nature is recurrence and not true repetition. Boredom is pure immanence, whereas genuine repetition is transcendence. This transcendence leads to happiness, Kierkegaard claims. And he even says, acutely, that if the repetition is not possible, human life dissolves into empty, meaningless noise.
(Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, pp. 92-93)
Kierkegaard has misled Svendsen. True repetition does not present a path out of the meaningless of boredom because repetition can only be false. Existential boredom reveals the falseness of repetition but it obscures repetition's lack of meaning within a general indifference. Meaning, according to Nancy, is an alterity (Sharing Voices). More insightfully, I think, in Being Singular Plural, he argues that meaning "is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are." The meaninglessness of boredom is precisely a withlessness. Its temporality is a withless temporality, one long, drawn moment of indifference.
Svendsen understands that moods can be shared and sees that in a certain sense a community can be defined by its shared moods. Some moods, however, like boredom, tend towards loneliness (p. 112). He says, "When one is in a mood, the world seems to be a particular field of possibilities; boredom differs from most other moods by the fact that the possibilities withdraw" (p. 113). It would be difficult for an existential phenomenology–such is Svendsen's bent–to acknowledge a mood that. rather than coloring the world, simply withdrew from the world. Phenomenology weakly grasps the withness of worlds.
Svendsen, however, does say that boredom is characterized by a loss of world (p. 128). And he says, "Boredom is mood which is reminiscent of an absence of moods. Since the mood is essential for our relation to objects, and boredom is a kind of non-mood, our relation to things also becomes a kind of non-relation" (p. 129). Does the recognition of this paradox of the mood that isn't a mood lead beyond an existential phenomenology? I'm not sure. Svendsen's critique of Heidegger, which basically amounts to substituting the concrete life for Being while acknowledging the shallowness of existential boredom, is firmly attached to the pursuit of phenomena of existential boredom. It is nevertheless, a difficulty.
Is there a phatics of boredom? ("I'm bored." "Me too.") Would saying "Let's be bored together" promise to put an end to the suffering of boredom? Would it put a dint in its indifference? I'm keen to read Svendsen's final chapter on the ethics of boredom, because I started reading from the beginning with the question in mind of how, if at all, boredom might be shared. In the mean time, I will not look towards repetition for a solution to the problem of boredom.
Labels: boredom, Kierkegaard, meaning, Nancy, Svendsen
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Should I feel sympathy for those who are indifferent, for the existentially bored? I can't deny feeling an empathy with the profoundly bored, but should I sympathize with them? Lars Svendsen (A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons, London: Reaktion Books, 2005) asks us to think of boredom as woven into the fabric of the modern condition. He is especially concerned with a type of boredom he calls existential boredom, which is not a question of idleness but rather of a loss of meaning (p. 34). Provocatively, Svendsen identifies indifference rather than alienation as the condition that enables boredom (p. 36). If I were to sympathize with the bored because they have interiorized an awful indifference of modernity, because they have made a loss of meaning their own, I would not only risk disrespecting the existential freedom of the bored, I would risk not seeing boredom for what it is. My sympathies then would in effect be meaningless. "It is impossible," Svendsen tells us, "to make any clear distinction between the respective contributions made by the subject and object to boredom, because the emptiness of the subject and object is so interwoven" (p. 44). Svendsen says, "One feels bored, for boredom does not have any content that would make it mine" (p. 41, Svendsen's emphases). Is there a person whose feeling of loss I can sympathize with, that I should sympathize with?
Boredom, according to Svendsen, is "a death within life, a non-life" (pp. 40-41). I don't extend to my sympathies to the dead, but to those who live with death, to those who feel the loss of others. Does one live with boredom, or is boredom a way of not living? How can one feel and not be living? How can I not sympathize with one who feels?
"Boredom is connected to reflection, and in all reflection there is a tendency towards a loss of world" (p. 33). Again, I empathize with those who reflect, but I am not sure whether I should sympathize with them. Does the thinker who fights to the tendency towards loss, and fails, succumbing to indifference, deserve my sympathies? What of the thinker who succumbs without a struggle?
What is the relationship between boredom and the experience of an uncertain subject? Existential boredom, Svendsen argues, "must fundamentally be understood on the basis of a dearth of accumulated experience. The problem is that we try to get beyond this boredom by piling on increasingly new and more potent sensations and impressions, instead of allowing ourselves time to accumulate experience" (p. 45, Svendsen's emphasis). Let's say I value rumination. It allows me time to accumulate an experience of thinking. Yet I have ample ground for empathizing with those who do not ruminate, for the glib, and I can't easily assign a responsibility for rumination. One of the characteristics of modern individualism is that it places a burden on the individual person to create or discover meaning for her own life, and the more life is focused on the individual, the "stronger the insistence on [finding] meaning amongst the trivialities of everyday life will become" (p. 27). Can I blame somebody for not finding meaning amongst trivialities? Can I be sure that boredom isn't such a triviality, that it truly is a big philosophical problem that Svendsen makes of it? "Only a problematic self feels the need for realization," Svendsen tells us (p. 32). I wouldn't want to make a further problem of somebody's self by suggesting that they shouldn't feel bored, that they should find their own meaning for their life. Yet I am not sure that finding one's own meaning in life doesn't alleviate the suffering of boredom. The "person" who suffers boredom has been bequeathed a problematic self. The suffering of boredom may be a price paid for the resistence to the problematic self. Certainly then I wouldn't pity the bored. It is difficult, though, to find common cause with the existentially bored, so long and insofar as they have succumbed to indifference.
I think there's a lot to be said for accumulating experience together. Sympathy for the bored may not foster togetherness. I don't know that it's a bad thing to sympathize with the bored. Perhaps, though, it misses the point (or pointlessness) of boredom.
Labels: boredom, compassion, existentialism, Svendsen