boredom and terror

I've been putting off this post because my thoughts on this topic are fairly inchoate. I feel as though I'm grasping at connections that still remain opaque to me. So this is a first stab at teasing out some ideas.

It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom. (Martin Amis, "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.")

The hunch I'm starting from is that terror and boredom bear a surprising family resemblance. It's perhaps Simmel who first notes the link between boredom and shock, suggesting that both are central to the experience of modernity. I want to think about the possibility that the relationship between the two is not merely causal—terror as an attempt to relieve or puncture boredom, for example—but that it stems from their common history as phenomena of modernity.

I know this is a controversial claim, since much contemporary discussion of terrorism characterizes it as an attack on modernity. (See, for instance, Amis's irritating article in the Observer, part one and part two). But instead, I think we should see it as part of the dialectic of modernity—terrorism as we understand it begins with Russian anarchists, and its history is intertwined with the technology and the experience of modernity, from Franz Ferdinand's assassination to 9/11. If I were writing an essay, I'd have to argue for terror's connection to modernity more forcefully, but if you'll grant me the point, I want to try and illustrate the case by suggesting that terror and boredom are linked through three categories which are themselves central to modernity: transport, the image, and the everyday. I don't have the time or space to develop an argument here, so some brief observations will have to do.



Let's start with transport. Modern forms of transport like the railway, the car, and the plane, which introduce new relationships to time and space, are central to the experience and the iconography of boredom. Similarly, they are central to the history of terror, as cars are blown up and planes and trains become targets and weapons. The geographies of terror and boredom, then, are curiously linked.



Next, the image. Debord argued that terror mirrored and reinforced the power of the state it purported to attack insofar as it was bound up in the society of the spectacle. British director Alan Clarke's film Elephant depicts terrorism in Northern Ireland as a series of apparently random killings that take place in an urban wasteland. The description of the film at the Toronto film festival evokes a kind of contemporary Waiting for Godot: "An empty space. A man. Another man. Bang." Richard Kirkland reads the film within the context of British-Northern Irish relations, skeptically analyzing the way it renders the terrorist as unknowable ("The Spectacle of Terrorism," Critical Survey 15.1 (2003): 77-90). It's a fair enough point, but I think the film is also a meditation on the way in which terror frequently seeks to operate through spectacle and image rather than through narrative. This is obviously the case with September 11; Julian Stallabrass, Zizek, and James Wood offer their thoughts on the significance of the image in that context.

I think there are also connections between boredom and the image. The repetition of an image through time or space seems central to the aesthetics of boredom, from Parr to Warhol, and images seem to lend themselves to repetition more easily than words. Patrice Petro argues that the history of boredom is bound up with sensory overload and excess, and, like the late nineteenth-century discourse of attention (mapped brilliantly by Jonathan Crary in Suspensions of Perception), it is linked to the anxiety that new visual technologies would produce distraction and fatigue. She points out that both Benjamin and Kracauer see boredom and shock similarly: they are the effects of modern modes of perception and new forms of visual technology which mirror the factory line, but they nonetheless potentially offer ways to challenge a bourgeois aesthetic of attention and absorption.


Finally, the everyday. I've mentioned before Arjun Apparurai's wonderful talk at UBC, in which he argued that terror worked upon the materials of the everyday, both solid (the urban infrastructure) and liquid (the everyday liquids currently banned from planes). He suggested that terror worked though the everyday revealing its instability, its invented nature. A further part of his argument was the claim that outside the West, such stability was less taken for granted, as the chaotic infrastructure of Mumbai or Lagos constantly reveals the instability of footpaths (dug up) or buildings (torn down). It's worth noting, I think, that several literary responses to 9/11, from Ian McEwan's Saturday to David Foster Wallace's short story "The Suffering Channel" to the Amis short story, take dailiness and its disruption as their central problematic. In McEwan's novel, both the everyday and the aesthetic are joined together as they are both under threat from the terrorist (who is disarmed by the reading of "Dover Beach." Nonsense!)

Similarly, in "The Infinite Conversation," Maurice Blanchot argues that "Boredom is the everyday become manifest: consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential––constitutive––trait of being unperceived." In other words, both terror and boredom can be defamiliarizing, revealing the arbitrary nature of habits and patterns.

Where does all this lead us? I'm not sure yet. Some preliminary thoughts: in "the war on terror," shock and fear become routinized, inextricably bound up with the tedium of waiting and the ritualized behaviour of the check-in. This intertwining of boredom and terror is inherent to the contradictory experience of modernity: shock is boring and change is banal, just as boredom itself can be mobilized as a gesture of refusal and a weapon to shock. Both boredom and terror, then, are connected to the indeterminacy and instability of contemporary life. They pose a challenge to attempts to order, understand, and to control, whether such attempts are political (what do we do with terrorism, with apathy?) or aesthetic (the sense that narratives break down in the face of boredom and terror). They also threaten the notion that we can easily be "at home" in the world, shaking any sense of ease and comfort. Perhaps they also both open up the possibility of change.

moods

I've kept thinking about the connection between Mark Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and moods. This is the extract we looked at in class:

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I suggested in class that we could see this as an example of the way in which information is stripped of meaning when it is stripped of mood (the basis for Heidegger's claim that mood is a fundamental component of our relationship to the world). Christopher, the narrator, has Asperger's Syndrome—a kind of autism—and has approaches the world as a logical puzzle to be solved. He has difficulty identifying or understanding others' emotions and expressing his own emotions. As a result, he has difficulty making sense of the world—here, in understanding why anyone would want to kill a dog.

But I want to revise my interpretation. Christopher does have an attunement towards the world, and his world is coloured by mood: this mood or attunement is puzzlement. He wants to make sense of the world, and feels frustrated when he can't. This is different from detachment or non-relation to the world, which would be the outcome of a completely mood-free way of being in the world. This creates a narrative which reverses the usual technique of defamiliarization, in which the familiar is rendered strange: in this novel, strange things—like a dog's murder—are flattened out as they take their place as merely one more puzzle of the sort that Christopher encounters everyday.

There's something Warholesque about this technique, in which trauma is drained of any particular impact. But in Warhol, trauma is no longer even a puzzle to be solved. In fact, I think the closest we've seen to a mood-free relation to the world is Andy Warhol's story "The Tingle," in which the narrator does his best to free himself from mood by turning himself into a machine—a tape-recorder. This is the aesthetics of boredom (and Heidegger is drawn to boredom because of the paradoxical way it is an attunement of non-attunement, a mood that detaches you from the world).

The problem is, though, that while the writer or narrator may be drained of mood, the reader isn't. While some readers of "The Tingle" may switch off in boredom, others will approach the story with different kinds of attunement, seeking to make sense of the puzzle. Our attunement as readers means that the aesthetics of boredom risks failing by producing a response of pasionate interest rather than shock or disengagement.

A final note: I was talking to someone this weekend who'd studied philosophy at Leuven, in Belgium, where there's a big phenomenology archive. It includes Husserl's copy of Being and Time, which apparently is full of marginal notes like: "Nonsense!" and "No, this is wrong!" Mood: frustrated. I liked this story—the student triumphant, the teacher impotent and marginalized, literally.

Oh, and because I can't resist, the Benjamin-Heidegger morph:

detour

I've found a pretty fantastic clip for you tomorrow from a 1959 Pathe newsreel showing the opening of the new motorway between Birmingham and London--the M1. This took me down a whole motorway/boredom detour. It led me past J. G. Ballard, who wrote in the sixties, "The motorway landscape is where the future of England reveals itself - and that future is boring," then to Iain Sinclair, the novelist-cum-psychogeographer. Sinclair, who is influenced by the Situationists, has written a book and helped direct a film on the M25, the motorway that circles London: both are called London Orbital. He writes about those projects here. In the film the co-director, Chris Petit, comments: "More than other motorways, the M25 is designed to test thresholds of boredom . . . . It is mainline boredom, it is true boredom, a quest of transcendental boredom, a state that offers nothing except itself, resisting any promise of breakthrough or story."

And all week, I've had the Black Box Recorder song The English Motorway System in my head: "The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It's been there forever, it's never going to change." Like boredom, the motorway is an historical experience which is lived as timeless and eternal. I don't know if these guys ever made it over here: they're like an ironic and sinister Saint Etienne. There's a female vocalist with a cool, beautiful voice, and poppy electronic beats; then, just as you're lulled into the sweetness, the lyrics slide in like a knife. Brutal.

(This is becoming a detour within a detour, but you can listen to Girl Singing in the Wreckage to get the idea. If that's not enough, their last album had a tribute to Andrew Ridgeley of Wham—"I never liked George Michael much/Although they say he was the talented one").

Anyway. Motorways. Boredom. I ended up thinking about Schivelbusch's argument that the development of the railway led to new modes of perception, and the response of boredom, and wondering if the motorway/freeway has trumped the railway by objectively producing the kind of internal boredom created when you travel at speed. I remembered my first experience of driving on a proper freeway, between Providence, Rhode Island, and Durham, North Carolina. It was incredibly boring, because for states and states, miles and miles, there was nothing but gently undulating landscape and trees, blocking the driver from distractions. And thousands of IHOPs (International House of Pancakes. International). Freeway boredom as an objective state, as well as a subjective one?

Detour over.

I wanted to be a little bit different

Martin Parr's work fascinates and disturbs me. His photos and the images he collects make me laugh, but I'm also thrown off guard. I find myself wondering what my responses say about me—and whether that kind of unsettling self-analysis is precisely what Parr is after.

Take Parr's collection Signs of the Times, a 1991 series of documentary photos focusing on domestic interiors with commentary by their owners, which we unfortunately won't have time to look at tomorrow. A framed reproduction of a terrible portrait hangs in an alcove, spotlit, above a stereo, a vase of flowers, and several ornaments: “She’s probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame she’s just a picture.” A man stands proudly against his fireplace, the recesses on either side displaying figurines and dried flower displays, while one is decorated in faux-stone cladding: “I wanted to be a little bit different, a little bit individual, that’s why I only did one side.” Or the one below, perhaps my favourite: "We wanted a cottagey stately home kind of feel":



The relationship of these photos to their subject is complex. As ironic satire, they expose these suburban inhabitants' commodity fetishism and their desire for status. Yet this interpretation is complicated by the frequently poignant commentary. Simultaneously hilarious and painful, these photographs explore the relationship between the everyday and the aesthetic, showing the way in which mundane domestic objects and spaces are invested by their owners with magical, dreamlike qualities, and become part of a landscape of loss and longing in which people assert subjectivity and exercise creativity.

Parr is a collector, and he loves the series, from Saddam Hussein watches to people using mobile phones. We've already noted boredom's affinity with the series—is it any wonder, then, that Parr is also drawn to boredom, from boring postcards to boring couples to Boring, Oregon. We'll talk tomorrow about seriality and collection: is Parr a Benjaminian collector, revealing the extraordinary behind the ordinary, or do his collections share Warhol's blankness?



We'll also begin to think about the current interest in boredom. Parr has said "Boring Postcards is a misnomer, because they are fascinating. But if you called them ‘Interesting Postcards’ no one would be interested." Why, at this moment, are we drawn to boring postcards and shows about nothing? In addition, we'll look at the relationship between boredom and irony, which both occupy the space between desire and reality. We'll briefly touch on the way tourism has changed as globalization has blurred the line between the exotic and the everday. And we'll discuss the ambiguous relation of Boring Postcards to the postwar utopian moment it documents, when the white heat of technology seemed to promise a new and more egalitarian future.

Andy Warhol, silver screen, can't tell them apart at all

Just quickly: we're back to copies and machines again this week. Warhol frequently compared himself to a machine: "I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?" And he embraced cinema as an aesthetics of the machine, emphasizing the mediated, articifial nature of the cinematic image in his films, both in the quality of the film stock and in his subject matter—from the Hollywood kiss to the saturated symbolism of the Empire State Bulding, itself a kind of technological sublime.

In Popism, he wrote:
"Now that I think back on it, I guess it was all the mechanical action that was the big thing for me at the Factory at the end of the sixties. . . . Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. Machinery had already taken over people's sex lives -- dildos and all kinds of vibrators -- and now it was taking over their social lives too, with tape recorders and Polaroids."

One critic writes that Warhol:
"cultivates boredom because it is, as he understands so well, an essential feature of a commodity culture, the inevitable result of the consumer's headlong pursuit of pleasure -- once novelty has been exhausted. By dwelling in boredom -- indeed, by insisting on it -- Warhol teaches us about the limitations of the pleasures that are offered to us under the sign of capitalism."

Another claims: "While the pseudo-cyclical flow of capitalist media provides essentially the same thing as a way to contain the subject, the potential of the loop, as an exact repetition, opens the emptiness of meaning (in its infinite proliferation) in a way that directs our attention to new terms of thought while watching the 'same exact thing'.”

Machines and boredom. What do you think?

at home

I've been wondering all week about two things: what we mean when we say we feel "at home," and why the house burnt down in the Alice Walker story. Maybe addressing the first question might help to answer the second.

As I was reading for last week's class, I came upon this line in the first chapter of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle: "The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere." I was struck by the fact that even Debord, with his emphasis on defamiliarization, sees feeling "at home" as a positive quality. It's synonymous with having our needs met, whether these are for creativity or comfort. This contrasts with Heidegger, for example, who saw the state of being "at home" as a deluded tranquility which is disrupted by the more authentic state of anxiety.

I've been thinking about which version of feeling "at home" is invoked in "Everyday Use." When Caitlin asked us for word and picture associations with "home," I remember that I wrote "warm," and Mike drew a picture of a fire. In retrospect these choices strike me, given we'd just read a story which in which there's a house fire. The fire that provides comfort and warmth can also destroy: the homely becomes unhomely. This fire scars Maggie as "homely," as she bears the marks of the home and its destruction. Does this fire imply that feeling at home is delusional or impossible?



There's clearly an allegorical dimension to the story, in which the burnt house represents America and its failure to be a place in which African Americans could be at home. In the face of that failure, Wangero/Dee chooses the life of the exile, simultaneously rejecting the state of being "at home" and locating it somewhere else—in Africa, rather than in her mother's house. The story implies that Wangero/Dee sees her mother's understanding of being "at home" as a kind of illusion: her mother and Maggie are attempting to make themselves at home in a place where they will always be exiles, and where they still bear the names of their oppressors. Rather than being marked by the destructive effects of this home, Dee/Wangero actively reshapes herself. She is not burnt but instead burns: the mother describes "the scalding humour that erupted like bubbles in lye" (27), and the way she "burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know" (26). Like the fire, Dee is a threat that emerges from inside the home.

The mother is afraid of fiery Dee and her rejection of home, while Dee scorns any relationship to home that isn't creative and aesthetic (using the quilts rather than hanging them). But I wonder if the image with which the story opens doesn't complicate the division between the aesthete's exile and passive domesticity. "A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. . . . It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house" (23). To me this image evokes a vision of being "at home" in the world which is neither diasporic nomadism nor the kind of fiercely defensive domesticity the mother invokes in her rejection of Dee's life and values. The world is the home and the home is the world.

Or perhaps I'm just being optimistic and romantic. Is it instead a bitter irony that the yard is more homelike than the house?

the giant of Ljubljana

People: Zizek is coming. There should be little twiddly things over both Zs but I can't work out how to do it outside of Word.

Find out more here.

He is, however, coming next Wednesday, at the same time as our class. Or more or less: 5 pm, at UBC. I have a cunning plan, though. If you're agreed, we'll start class at 7, and devote the first hour to a showing of the Warhol film. This will give those of use who want to see Slavoj (and have seen the film in advance) time to get back to campus for a lively Warhol discussion starting at 8.

There is little direct relevance to our class, beyond the Kierkegaard references, and the possible make-up class on boredom and terror. But if you're interested, you should show up early to get a seat.

good question

I'm excited again. First, by the thought of various situationist practices I have planned for class—we'll be détourning and dériving away. The Lefebvre reading was rather dull, I thought, but Debord is quite racy, and situationism lends itself to all kinds of fun. Second, by the Felski article. I know I've made you read this twice, Ananta and Jessica, but perhaps, after tomorrow, you can see it as a situationist act of reworking. And it's so good, so good.

But I think we're going to have to tackle the f-word tomorrow. Feminism, people: what's your problem? I ask this in a loving way. Truly, with open ears and mind, shaved legs, and a general will to defend the desire to eradicate systemic and structural inequalities based on gender.



One of the questions the Felski article made me think about was the difference between boredom and the everyday. It seems that there are similarities but also important differences in the philosophical/critical writing about each category. Felski points out that the everyday has usually been defined in contrast to philosophy, art, and heroism. Yet boredom, as we've seen, can be annexed as the province of the aesthete (Kierkegaard, Holmes, Benjamin) and the philosopher (Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Benjamin).

This led me back to Benjamin's question: "What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom" (105)? In other words, what is boredom not? I have various terms scribbled in the margin here: engagement, revolutionary action, meaning, critical thinking, uncritical acceptance, the boring masses, the thinking individual. Then the cop-out marginal scribble: "good question."

But my random list made me think that there are various oppositions that boredom seems, almost magically, to straddle. In no particular order, and in Benjaminiam notelike fashion, though not as poetic:

1. the individual and the group.
The bored individual defines himself against the stupid, happy masses. Alternatively, the critical thinker defines himself against the bored masses.

2. the powerful and the powerless.
Boredom can be a way of seizing agency, of refusing the investment or interest required by superiors. But boredom can also be an experience to which we are subjected against our will, and the condition that ensues when we lack freedom and control of our lives.

3. the everyday and the exceptional/the aesthetic.
Boredom can be the tedious, the monotonous, the routine. It can also, however, be the conduit for creativity, and a means by which the world can be questioned.

4. unconsciousness/consciousness
This is a big one. Many of the writers we've read assume the virtues of the latter. Boredom is lauded or judged to the extent that it is a conscious critical practice. If so, two thumbs up; if not, it's a sign of the unthinking acceptance of habitual modes of being and behaving.

This is my little sketch of some of the places boredom has taken us. I'm interested in boredom's malleability and flexibility: it can cross both sides of these boundaries. Why is that? Are these oppositions related to others we've encountered--material/metaphysical, immanent/transcendent? Are there others that we've come across?

Is boredom some kind of limit experience that marks the porousness between the boundaries of these categories?

Why does everything come back to deconstruction?

another thought

We've talked a lot about boredom as a response to the commonplace, the familiar, and the everyday. But we also get bored when faced with things that perplex us, and with material that is so unfamiliar it is hard to understand. I'm sure I would be deeply bored going to a physics lecture, for example, or reading a book on chemistry.

It seems worth thinking about this kind of boredom. There's a lot of habit and repetition in Beckett, but there's also a constant encounter with the unfamiliar: the "abyssal depths," in Vladimir's words. In a way, the familiar and the unfamiliar end up meeting each other as both are equally absurd.

On that cheery note, I'll finish for the night.

pain and boredom

I’ve just finished reading an article by Joe Brooker on boredom in Malone Dies, one of Beckett’s novels. You can get to it through this link. Brooker analyzes the phrase “what tedium,” which punctuates that novel, alongside another narrative interruption, “this is awful.” He concludes that boredom undoes itself or disappears as it is “named in retrospect in an act of naming which itself dispels boredom, and it has a way of intensifying itself to the point where it is so unendurable that its claim to the name ‘tedium’ becomes dubious” (7).

In other words, he argues that commenting on boredom is actually an escape from boredom, and that persistent boredom stops being boring because it is transformed into pain. A similar argument could be made about Waiting for Godot, I think. However, I’m skeptical about both Brooker’s points. We’ll talk about the first one in class tomorrow, but I have some thoughts about the second now. Or soon, after a picture (I've always thought Beckett was rather good-looking in a haggard-older-man kind of way):


Boredom and pain are always linked in Beckett. To be bored requires thought, or self-consciousness, and in Beckett, thought is pain: "What is terrible is to have thought," says Vladimir. So boredom inevitably entails pain. The question is whether, as Brooker assumes, pain is different from boredom, and takes us away from monotony into the realm of intensity.

I don’t think so. It’s quite possible for pain to be boring. We tend to think of pain as a sharp jolt or the experience of intensity, but pain can be low-level, chronic, dull, and tedious—as well as being boring to talk about.

And if pain can be boring, can't boredom be painful, or at least intense? I’ve certainly been intensely bored, most recently on Saturday night when someone talked to me about evolutionary biology for half an hour. No! Go away! Brooker assumes not because he relies on Adorno’s definition of boredom as the eversame. And Adorno, of course, thinks that you can be bored without being aware of it, as you are unwittingly trapped in monotony, and that boredom is the enemy of thought. But there’s another understanding of boredom as discomfort or dissatisfaction with the eversame, which we've seen in Baudelaire and Kracauer.

So, are boredom and pain opposites or synonyms? Is boredom a feeling or an escape from feeling?