Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Sociology of Boredom’

Abstract

The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed an account of modernity that combined rigorous critique, a rejection of nostalgia, left pessimism or transcendental appeals, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden recesses of the everyday. This article will focus on a topic that is arguably central to his ‘critique of everyday life’ but has been entirely overlooked in the literature thus far: that of boredom. Although often dismissed as trivial, boredom can be understood as a touchstone through which we can grasp much wider anxieties, socio-cultural changes and subjective crises that are intrinsic to our experience of modernity. Curiously, although Lefebvre was very interested in boredom, he did not analyse it systematically, and he used terms like ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’ in loose, elliptical and seemingly contradictory ways. Such a lack of clarity reveals his ambivalence about this phenomenon, but also highlights a subtle pattern of differentiation he makes between particular modalities of boredom that can be highly illuminating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvre’s writings, we can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively. With respect to the latter, as he says in Introduction to Modernity, under certain conditions boredom can be full of desires, frustrations and possibilities. Through such an investigation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.

The Rhythm of Echoes and Echoes of Violence

“…While Rhythmanalysis has itself germinated a fascinating array of case studies, ranging from the 'rhythms' of social institutions such as museums (Prior, 2011), time-lapse photography (Simpson, 2012), soundwalking (Hall et al, 2008), post-conflict pedagogy (Christie, 2013), to mobility studies generally (DeLyser and Sui, 2012), 'rhythm' unintentionally becomes an interchangeable conceptual category with 'tempo' and 'speed' or, generally, 'life' and 'vitality'. In resonance with Michael E. Gardiner's (2012) observation that Lefebvre holds a tenuous and non-systematic commitment to the concepts he introduces, Rhythmanalysis's mechanics of rhythms (i.e. tempo, speed, duration) are equivocated, non-specific, and ambivalent.…”

“…The rhythmanalyst of postmodernity by consequence seems no more removed from self-reflexive observation than the clichef aˆneur of modernity (see Shields, 2006). As cultural theories of rhythm have, in recent years, both come into existence and resurfaced (see Michon, 2005), scholars have adopted and modified rhythm to suit a wide range of macro-, meso-, and micro-level studies, which constitutes a spectrum of studies from the rhythmic transformations of history (Gardiner, 2012) to the pulses of everyday life (Simpson, 2008). Only recently, and on a much rarer occasion, have we seen attempts at an interlocking rhythmanalysis between local activities and larger historical processes of social transformation (Borch, 2005); indeed, the interlocking of smaller and larger pulses and patterns constitutes a central defining feature of rhythm.…”

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“…Capturing the routines and rhythms of everyday life—such as visits to the gym, the pool, or the local café—is valuable not only for what it reveals about specific commercial venues, but also for what it reveals about the spatio-temporal nature of routine, everyday mobilities. Boredom (and its cousin, distraction) is a component part of everyday mobilities (Gardiner, 2012) and thus a valued state for LMSN firms (Hand, 2017; Paasonen, 2016), especially when it becomes “attentive boredom” (Phillips, 1993, p. 78), in that it provides opportunities (even if only fleeting ones) for engagement with applications like Foursquare. Through this engagement, valuable interactional information can be generated that offers insight into what occurs when, as Anderson (2004) puts it, time is stilled and space is slowed.…”

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“…In his work on the ‘everyday’, Henri Lefebvre (2008) argues that boredom is a product of modernity: it is qualitatively different from its religious or aristocratic antecedents such as acedia or ennui . It is a mass rather than individual phenomenon and a feeling which not only fails to be satiated by, but is in fact produced by, constant craving for novelty in a world which stresses constant innovation and change (Gardiner, 2012). But as we have seen not just any novelty will do.…”