Lefabre and Boredom

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417460
2012 29: 37 Theory Culture Society
Michael E. Gardiner
Henri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom'
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Henri Lefebvre and the
Sociology of Boredom
Michael E. Gardiner
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 potentiali-
ties 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 dis-
missed 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 illumi-
nating. Through a careful reading of the full range of Lefebvres writings, we
can begin to understand how he discriminates between different experi-
ences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously neg-
ative, 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 investi-
gation, we start to glimpse latent connections between boredom and uto-
pian propensities that caught the attention not only of Lefebvre but also
such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.
Key words
affect j boredom j Lefebvre j Marxism j utopia
j
Theory, Culture & Society 2012 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 29(2): 37^62
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417460
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On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom, and
the critique of everyday life has a sociology of boredom as part of its
agenda. (Lefebvre, 2002: 75)
I
F MANY of my academic colleagues are to be believed, boredom is a
superficially fleeting and essentially psychological condition that can
be dispelled easily by a brisk walk or arresting diversion. Such mild
psychic disturbances can hardly be the purview of a rigorous social science
concerned with altogether weightier issues, and the reassurance of dealing
with such solid, measurable facts as income disparities or the rate of violent
crime. One of the ironies of this attitude is that boredom has been subjected
to considerable scrutiny by a wide range of writers and philosophers in the
modern age, from Pascal to Kierkegaard and Heidegger, right up to contem-
porary figures like Agamben or Baudrillard. In the work of these thinkers,
boredom looms as an ethical and existential problem of great significance
(see Kuhn, 1976; Svendsen, 2005). More germane to our purposes, however,
is the recent emergence of a vein of scholarly inquiry that examines bore-
dom not as a timeless metaphysical conundrum, nor a purely psychological
state often reducible to simple physiological causes, but as a diffuse affec-
tive experience that is correlated strongly with the consolidation of moder-
nity itself, and hence the result of specific socio-historical and cultural
factors. This implies that boredom is a mass phenomenon, and that it can
be interpreted as a touchstone through which we can grasp wider anxieties
and societal changes, especially how our lived, embodied experience of time
has been transformed in the modern world (see Goodstein, 2005; Dalle
Pezze and Salzani, 2008; Spacks, 1995).
As important as this research has been in redirecting our gaze towards
the sociological constitution of boredom, what it lacks is an awareness that
if boredom is an historically contingent mood or condition, then it can be
at least partly superseded, especially if we realize that boredom itself
might occasionally harbour flashes of subversive insight and the seeds of
transformational praxis. Even in her path-breaking Experience without
Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein shies away from
explicit social critique, suggesting that boredom is, ultimately, the unavoid-
able price we pay for living in a disenchanted and rationalized world (2005:
12). There are, however, more critical lines of thinking available to us. For
example, in such texts as The Storyteller and the Convolute D section
of The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin asserts that the ethos of smooth,
continuous progress that is held to occur in all sectors of life under moder-
nity functions to mask a deeper homogenization and repetitive sameness
that induces boredom in the modern subject. Yet, paradoxically, certain
manifestations of boredom for Benjamin can also tap into collective wish-
images of an emancipated humanity, and hence be understood as contribut-
ing to the interruption of the runaway juggernaut of modernity.
As with work on Benjamin generally, his meditations on boredom,
however scattered and inchoate they might seem, have already received
38 Theory, Culture & Society 29(2)
considerable attention (see A. Benjamin, 2005; Moran, 2003; Salzani, 2009).
In contrast, commentary on the French sociologist and philosopher Henri
Lefebvres comparable treatment of the same topic is notable by its complete
absence. This situation is, arguably, symptomatic of the relative neglect of
Lefebvres ideas in Anglo-American circles until recently, at least outside
certain currents of critical geography and broad historical surveys of post-
war French socio-political thought. Given the relative inattention paid to
Lefebvres work generally, and especially in this area, my central purpose
will be to explore his embryonic sociology of boredom, and to treat it as a
significant but as yet unexamined component of his overarching critique
of everyday life.
When referring to the everyday, Lefebvre invokes G.W.F. Hegels
maximThe familiar is not necessarily the known. In so doing, Lefebvre is
striving to put his finger on something that, partly by virtue of its very per-
vasiveness in our lives, remains one of the most trivialized and misunder-
stood aspects of social existence. Mysterious, yet at the same time
substantial and fecund, everyday life is the crucial foundation upon which
the so-called higher activities of human beings, including abstract cognition
and practical objectifications, are premised. We must therefore be concerned
above all with redeeming its hidden and oft-suppressed potentials
(Lefebvre, 1991a: 87). Furthermore, Lefebvres approach contrasts with
many phenomenological approaches in its insistence that everyday life has
a specific history, one that is intimately bound up with the dynamics of
modernity, and hence riven with numerous contradictions and marked by a
considerable degree of ambiguity and internal complexity. For Lefebvre,
everyday life, understood as an identifiable domain or attitude seemingly
distinct from more specialized actions and knowledges, is a product of the
modern world itself.
This general orientation applies equally to his conceptualization of
boredom. But although Lefebvre was keenly interested in boredom and its
cognates (such as alienation, indifference or tragic melancholy), and refer-
ences to it crop up frequently in his works, he did not analyse it systemati-
cally, insofar as he uses terms like boring or boredom in loose, elliptical
and seemingly contradictory ways. Such an apparent lack of precision
reveals not only a deep ambivalence that Lefebvre harbours about this phe-
nomenon, but also highlights a subtle and illuminating pattern of differen-
tiation vis-a-vis particular modalities of boredom. In certain passages,
Lefebvre would seem to concur with the stance taken by the Situationist
International that boredom is irredeemably counter-revolutionary ^ that
everyday life in the modern world is so deadened by stultifying routine,
the banalization of culture and the colonization of subjectivity by the specta-
cle that deep and unrelenting boredom is the inevitable result, and total rev-
olution the only cure. But other manifestations are judged in a more
affirmatory way, inasmuch as they are pregnant with desires, frustrated
frenzies, [and] unrealized possibilities (Lefebvre, 1995: 124). Indeed, in
the variegated if muted subjective palette that is boredom, which is not a
Gardiner ^ Henri Lefebvre and the Sociology of Boredom 39
discrete and unambiguous experience but a multiplicity of moods and feel-
ings that resist analysis (Phillips, 1993: 78), we can begin to glimpse latent
connections between certain forms of boredom and utopian propensities.
These conjoinings caught the attention not only of Benjamin but also
Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and others (see Osborne, 2006).
In the following discussion, I will begin by examining the broader
conditions of modernity that have arguably given rise to the contemporary
experience of boredom, drawing on some of the most recent scholarship in
this area. Next, I delve into the specificities of Lefebvres understanding of
the relationship between modernity and boredom, and, crucially, what he
takes to be the range of possible responses to the epidemic of mass boredom
in our age. Especial reference will be made here to such typically
Lefebvrean concepts as the moment, the aleatory and Marxist irony. It
should be emphasized that Lefebvre is a deliberately anti-systematic thinker,
and there is no fully articulated theory of boredom in his writings.
Accordingly, this article must be understood as a somewhat speculative exer-
cise in conceptual reconstruction and synthesis that, hopefully, remains
aligned with the spirit and substance of his overarching critical project.
The conclusion will present an opportunity to conjecture as to the nature
and significance of Lefebvres contribution to the emerging field of what
might be termed boredom studies.
Boredom and Its Discontents
Literary and cultural history is filled with accounts of emotional and affec-
tive experiences in which the world, and the individuals that populate it,
appear to be dull and banal, without interest, meaning or purpose. These
include tedium vitae or horror loci (in the Greco-Roman literature), acedia
(the noonday demon mentioned in early Christian texts), the melancholia
made famous by Robert Burton, and of course ennui, a condition briefly
fashionable among the 18th-century literati (see Raposa, 1999; Toohey,
1988). Superficially, these appear to be very similar to boredom. But,
although each produced distinct terminologies and images that were
evoked by subsequent generations, a strong case can be made for a specifi-
cally modern form of boredom that has no direct analogue in earlier types
of subjective malaise. Elizabeth Goodstein articulates this position convinc-
ingly in the aforementioned Experience without Qualities: Boredom and
Modernity. Her main argument is that we should not refer to subjective
experiences outside the discursive contexts through which they are consti-
tuted. Particular historical conjunctures bring to the fore distinctive rhe-
torics of reflection, by which subjects articulate a coherent sense of
selfhood and affirm their rightful place in the world.
When we mention to friends or colleagues that we are bored, we are
unlikely to make reference to an imbalance of the humours, a physiological
cum cosmological explanation characteristic of the early modern discourse
on melancholy, much less the demonically inspired religious doubts and
confusions of acedia, which afflicted monks in the early Christian era.
Furthermore, these earlier forms seemed to affect only the educated elites,
or even narrow segments of them, such as the grand metaphysical tedium
that troubled particular circles in the court of Louis XIV (see Lepenies,
1992: 36^46). Only the educated strata had access to the cultural and liter-
ary resources to frame such experiences hermeneutically, and give them rhe-
torical and conceptual coherence. For the majority of the labouring
population, by contrast, traditional communal and religious ties functioned
to anchor subjects in a world of shared and immanent meaning.
Experiences such as melancholia or ennui certainly existed, but they were
distinctly anomalous, confined to the literate classes, and linked to well-
established religious and cosmological discourses.
The word boredom dates from the 1760s but did not come into
common usage until decades later, and such variants as to bore or boring
emerged in the 19th century (1812 and 1864, respectively) (Dalle Pezze
and Salzani, 2008: 11; Spacks, 1995: 32). Quite apart from questions of ety-
mology, boredom in the modern period generally lacks the weighty meta-
physical resonance attributed to concepts like ennui or even the German
Langeweile, in spite of Kierkegaards suggestion that boredom is the root
of all evil (1959: 281). Hence, boredom seems to be about emotional flat-
ness and resigned indifference, something that grips us more or less invol-
untarily, without an identifiable cause, shape or object; it lacks the air of
the dramatic and sentimental nostalgia for happier times typically associ-
ated with its antecedents. At least as significantly, boredom is a resolutely
mass phenomenon. Writing in The Arcades Project, Benjamin noted that,
beginning in France in the 1840s, Western societies were gripped by an epi-
demic of boredom, which he identified with the atrophy of experience char-
acteristic of mechanized and urbanized social life (1999a: 108). It swept
through all social strata, classes and professions indiscriminately. At this
time, England referred to this pandemic as the French disease. France (pre-
sumably) retaliated by calling it the English malady, perhaps taking espe-
cial note of the widely reported case of an Englishman who committed
suicide because he could not bear the tedium of dressing himself each
morning.
The historical emergence of boredom is made possible by two develop-
ments that followed in the wake of the twin revolutions of industrialization
and the French Republic. The first is a process of cultural modernization
that devalues the past, stressing instead perpetual change, innovation and
transformation vis-a-vis both self and world. The second is an increasingly
standardized form of social existence, which is under continuous assault
from the acceleration and redeployment of temporality that is the crux of
modernization. Formerly heterogeneous activities are subjected to the tyr-
anny of a universal clock-time, and individual moments, especially under
the sway of industrial labour, become repetitive, interchangeable and bereft
of meaning (see Lepenies, 1992: 87^9). The instantiation of this empty,
homogeneous time must also be understood in relation to the continual
shocks of modern urban life. As Georg Simmel (1997) noted famously in
his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, in the modern city all the
usual anchors of personal identity and meaning are swept away in a mael-
strom of sensory bombardments and activities. It brought mass anonymity
and the blase attitude, new distractions and leisure forms, public squares
and broad avenues, theatres and cafe s, but also a host of new class,
regional and gender antagonisms that sharpened over the course of the cen-
tury. As scientific prowess increased, there was a widespread sense that
the ties that bound society together, and hitherto provided a meaningful
theodicy, were collapsing. Nineteenth-century Europe was marked by the
triumph of the material over the spiritual, objective over subjective, quanti-
tative over qualitative, fuelling a sense of profound dislocation and anomie
that obsessed such early sociologists as Durkheim and Tnnies.
According to Goodstein, these themes were taken up in a variety of lit-
erary and cultural forms so as to constitute a distinctly modern rhetoric of
reflection. Max Webers disenchantment of the world, in which quotidian
elements no longer had a distinct meaning and self-evident relation to the
whole, is made possible by the Enlightenments cultivation of sceptical intel-
lectual distance, through which earlier certitudes fail to ring true after
being subjected to systematic and unceasing rational investigation.
Nihilism is at the heart of modern scientific rationality, because the latter
grasps the world as a collection of inert facts devoid of life or intrinsic
meaning, positing a universe that is profoundly indifferent to human exis-
tence. This makes possible an agnosticism with respect to crucial existential
and philosophical questions that is available not only to the writer or aes-
thete but also the common people ^ leading ultimately to what Goodstein
calls a democratized skepticism. Such a mass scepticism was steeped in the
new scientific and materialist explanatory framework, which was, perhaps
inevitably, applied to boredom as well. This novel rhetoric had no precursor
in earlier reflections on acedia or melancholy, bound up as they were in
now antiquated religious or metaphysical notions. It held up a resolutely
desacralized vision of the body, an entity animated by abstract natural
forces, impulses and energies. Accordingly, boredom was usually thought
to be the result of nervous exhaustion or social overstimulation, often identi-
fied by the curious affliction then called neurasthenia (see Blom, 2009:
265^9), rather than a moral failing, the usual 18th-century response.
Although the modern period was generally thought to have superseded
both the ancient and medieval worlds, what is most ironic is that it also pro-
vided the intellectual resources to undermine its own newly wrought tradi-
tions, practices and standards. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx
said, and this applied equally to bourgeois platitudes and the suddenly frag-
ile epistemological certitudes that science sought to establish. Boredom, in
other words, is above all an estrangement from the formerly stable moral
and socio-cultural foundations of acting and thinking. But, curiously
enough, because this modern rhetoric of reflection diagnosed boredom in
deterministic medical or social scientific terms, its actual historical
formation was obscured, which functioned to naturalize boredom as ines-
capable fate, as an epidemic or contagion that overwhelms the individual.
Whereas earlier modes of thinking about spiritual or psychological distress
related it to presumptive religious, moral or cultural decline, talk about
boredom is couched now in a discursive form that is thoroughly materialist,
secular and reconciled to the demise of transcendental meaning. In short,
boredom is simultaneously a product of modernity and intrinsic to the very
nature of modern existence itself, at once cause and symptom of the dilem-
mas, anxieties and experiences that mark the contemporary age. As
Goodstein succinctly puts it, boredom is a vaguely disquieting mood that
haunts the Western world[,] both as the disaffection with the old that
drives the search for change and as the malaise produced by living under a
permanent speedup (2005: 18).
Modernity, Repetition and Commodity Time
If it is correct to assume that boredom is experienced as a subjective mal-
aise intrinsic to the social forces that constitute modernity, how does
Lefebvres understanding of boredom relate to this account? I suggest it
fits very well indeed. Much of his understanding of the formation and
nature of modern boredom hinges on a transformation in our experience of
time ^ specifically, an epochal transition from cyclical historical time to an
abstract, linear form that might be termed commodity time. Life in pre-
modern societies, according to Lefebvre, was organized in relation to the
endless, undulating cycles of birth and death, remembrance and recapitula-
tion that mark the natural world. Daily life had a distinctly recurrent or rep-
etitious character, but was profoundly lived and embodied collectively, in a
world that (with a nod to Heidegger) we inhabit poetically as well as materi-
ally. This mode of natural repetition, together with interwoven human activ-
ities, generates constant newness within continuity. Although he rejects
both cosmological Romanticism and mechanical materialism, Lefebvre is
adamant that nature represents a fecundity, a fundamental power that devel-
ops cyclically. He gives the example of an ocean wave: although appearing
interchangeable to the casual observer, each is subtly different, shaped in
infinitesimal ways by wind, the movement of the sea, undercurrents, salin-
ity and temperature. There are smaller rhythms within the larger ones,
each big wave gives birth to tinier eddies and whorls; in some instances
they are gentle, at other times immensely threatening, like the unpredict-
able rogue wave. In examining waves closely, Lefebvre writes, we begin to
notice that there is always something unexpected, always something which
seems to be a fragment but is suddenly a whole (1995: 129).
Pre-modern societies established contact with these elemental forces
and rhythms through innumerable festivals, rituals and celebrations. The
festival disrupts the human order of praxis[,] identifying with the rhythms
of the cosmos, as Lefebvre says (1995: 146). This enmeshing of natural
with embodied human rhythms can be seen most directly in the exercise
of human labour. Work in pre-modern times was understood as both a social
and personal creation, a craft that involved shaping natural materials in
tandem with their intrinsic physical properties, by applying practical knowl-
edges built up over eons. In the performance of apparently identical tasks,
there is always variation and novelty, however slight, and technical know-
how relies more on flexible and largely improvised rules of thumb than
the rigid application of abstract and invariant principles. Labour unfolds
according to intrinsic time-scales, themselves integrated into a broader,
coherent style of life marked by custom, habit and ritual. The time of such
non-accumulative societies is distinctive: sensual, qualitative in nature,
integrated into the body, and imbued with poetic or aesthetic qualities.
Under modernity, the situation is starkly different. Here, the domi-
nant form of repetition is derived from the dictates of technology, work
and production, rather than from the natural world. The economy becomes
the central axis of society and the fulcrum of historical transformation,
and all the diverse realms of society are subordinated to the project of capi-
tal accumulation and enhanced technological control, increasingly under
the aegis of the state. Hence, we witness a shift to a purely quantitative
time favouring a formal, decontextualized knowledge, and which is experi-
enced as abstract, linear, sequential, predictable and monotonous. The time
of modernity is determined by the logic of the commodity and its endless
flows and homeostatic circuits, of exchange- rather than use-value. It is a
time of endless nows, described by Lefebvre as a growing multiplicity of
neutral, indifferent instants (2005: 85; see also Maffesoli, 1998).
In the accelerated yet truncated time of modern urban life, a signifi-
cant result is the loss of shared remembrance. What is crucial here is the
deterioration of the role formerly played by cyclical repetition in the mainte-
nance of social memory. In the predominantly oral culture of pre-modern
times, societies developed rich symbolic systems that were connected organ-
ically to the rhythms and cycles of nature, and, through innumerable rituals
and ceremonies, sustained communal memories over millennia. With the
fragmentation of a formerly integrated style of life and the dominance of
exchange-value, communication is increasingly mediated by electronic
forms of storage, reproduction, and transmission, which for Lefebvre is the
handmaiden of rational administration, surveillance and technocratic
power. The multifaceted symbol is increasingly replaced by the signal, the
latter of which is born with industrialization (Lefebvre, 2002: 300).
Signals reduce the semantic field to a fixed image or idea, and interrupt
the continuity of historical experience and collective memorialization. This
creates a situation in which, as Bergson also noted, the immediate instant
tends to disappear in an instant which has already passed, rather than
embedded organically in the flow of perceptual and experiential duration
(Lefebvre, 1995: 166). Signals call for an automatic, essentially passive
response; they constitute semiotic mechanisms of compulsion. There is no
need to foster collective memory and historical experience if the signal can
condition individual responses more or less automatically, for the purpose
of undertaking discrete and fragmented instrumental tasks of the sort
modernity demands. Whereas the pre-modern craftsperson learns from mis-
takes, and builds upon, masters and ultimately revivifies techniques trans-
mitted from past generations, the modern unskilled factory worker has
access to nothing of the sort. As such, the loss of experience in modern
times is more than merely aesthetic: it is social and cultural as well.
Many readers will realize that this account approximates closely
Benjamins discussion of oral culture and tradition in his famous 1936
essay The Storyteller. Here, Benjamin suggests that storytelling in pre-
modern societies was a communal yet intimate enterprise. The storytellers
goal was not simply to pass the time, but to construct a coherent, meaning-
ful narrative out of the flux of daily life, to fashion the raw material of expe-
rience, in a solid, useful, and unique way (Benjamin, 1968: 108). By this
process, collective traditions and memories were cultivated and transmitted
across generations. Yet, this did not occur without alteration or change: in
storytelling, repetition is crucial for both continuity and transformation,
inasmuch as difference emerges out of each iteration. No two tellings are
the same; in every repetition, the storys central narrative is subtly embel-
lished, digressed from and altered, not only by the storytellers, but the lis-
teners as well. The story unfolds slowly, according to its own rhythms and
cadences, its shifting moods and affective colourations. To grasp the story
and its allegorical resonances properly, one has to be in an appropriately
receptive frame of mind, which can only occur if we are well and truly
bored, something that we have insufficient opportunity for in modern
urban life. As Benjamin writes, the assimilation of narrative requires a
state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee
of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation (1968:
91). What is distinctive about modernity is that stories are no longer spun
and rewoven continually in communal settings, but are presented as mere
bits of information and consumed through essentially passive and solitary
acts. To be hooked on the endless streams of information that allegedly con-
stitute news, or to focus intently on every fleeting change of fashion, is for
Benjamin a form of addiction. In the modern world, therefore, we are wit-
ness to the replacement of the older narration by information, of informa-
tion by sensation, [which] reflects the increasing atrophy of experience
(1968: 159). We find more than an echo of this in Lefebvres suggestion
that information deletes thought and reduces positive knowledge to that
which is amassed, accumulated, memorized without gaps, outside of lived
experience (2005: 150).
The instant experienced as endless and empty repetition, as boredom,
is a Sisyphean punishment characteristic of an unredeemed modernity. It
undermines the assumption that the historical trajectory of modernity is
one of boundless improvement and appropriately sunny optimism. The
irony is that the obsession with the new in the modern world functions to
mask a deeper homogenization and repetitive sameness. For Lefebvre, line-
arity imposes its mechanical regularity, a monotonous banality, on the
everyday. Within this monotony, there is change of a sort, but it is pro-
grammed and predictable, like the planned obsolescence that keeps us con-
tinually lusting after new commodities, spectacles and experiences
(Lefebvre, 1987: 10). To be integrated into the demands of the economic
system, the human body has to be broken like a draft animal, trained to
incorporate stereotypical actions and gestures into modes of bodily deploy-
ment to the point of near-automatism, or what Lefebvre calls dressage
(Lefebvre and Re gulier, 2004: 40). In the unfolding of natural rhythms, he
argues, things are created afresh; the dawn of each successive day brings
with it the promise of new starts and unforeseen discoveries. By contrast,
linear repetition, as in the individual stroke of the hammer or keyboard,
which can begin or stop at any time and is not immersed in a cohesive and
organic temporal flow, results in lassitude, boredom and fatigue. Linearity
alone is amenable to being fully quantified and homogenized . . . [and a
fully] quantified social time is indifferent to day and night, to the rhythms
of impulses (Lefebvre, 2005: 129, 130). As such, the dominance of com-
modity time means that each instant is crammed with more and more activ-
ities, distractions, visual stimuli and entertainments; but this time is also
manifestly empty, because bereft of the qualitative meanings and symbols
that contribute to the formation of individual and collective identities.
In sum, the modern economy relies on linear scales that project a uni-
lateral homogeneous and desacralized time, geared towards maximum accu-
mulation, supplying the fundamental basis on which the very warp and
woof of everyday life is organized (Lefebvre and Re gulier, 2004: 73). Yet,
Lefebvre also argues that there are limits to the technocratic structuring of
the everyday. Natural rhythms cannot be entirely eliminated, and many
aspects of daily life remain hidden and obscure, beyond the grasp of the
fully legible Cartesian space that technocratic rationalism strives to create.
The human body, for instance, retains a cryptic opacity, and does not
entirely succumb to the power of abstract rational thought, preserving dif-
ference within repetition (Lefebvre, 1991b: 203). Similarly, echoes of
ancient festival traditions continue to persist in the interstices and margins
of contemporary urban life. Accordingly, cyclical and linear repetitions
coexist in the modern age, as part of an overarching if conflictual unity.
[C]yclic time scales have been ripped asunder by the linear time of the pro-
cess of accumulation and have been left to hang in tatters within us and
around us, writes Lefebvre. And yet symbolisms, rhythms and the shat-
tered or degenerate nucleuses continue to organize the everyday (2002:
336). This is why the everyday cannot be defined by repetition alone;
rather, it is the place where sameness and creativity meet and interact.
Music provides us with a good example: it is traversed by both the linear
(beat) and cyclical (melody and harmony), both of which are necessary for
musical production. Accordingly, we need to realize that there are different
modalities of the repetitive in the modern world. However degraded, trivial-
ized and quantified, the enduring character of the everyday ^ its desires,
labours, pleasures ^ represents a set of unsurpassable values for Lefebvre,
and its potentialities demand realization in the here and now (1984: 14).
The Politics of Boredom
For Lefebvre, the banalization of life under modernity is epitomized by the
suburban blandness of the post-war new towns, where city planners and
bureaucrats have constructed machines for living that deprive life of all
spontaneity, depth and passion. Here, we seem to be poised to enter a
world of unredeemable boredom (Lefebvre, 1995: 119) ^ yet we might also
be on the brink of something altogether different. The task that lies before
us, as part of the general revitalization of everyday life, is a restoration of
the shared experience of lived temporality, wherein emotions, feelings and
subjectivity would be reaffirmed, along with rhythm, body movements,
the life of the flesh (Lefebvre, 1995: 263). In contemplating the battle over
the imposition of compulsive time, Lefebvre envisages a number of differ-
ent responses vis-a-vis boredom, ranging from the distractions of consumer-
ism, the cultivation of a quasi-aristocratic ennui, various mysticisms and
philosophical irrationalisms, the aesthetic provocations of the Surrealists,
all the way to such moments as the Paris Commune or the near-revolution
of May 1968 in France. Discussing such varied reactions will help us to
understand why Lefebvre believes that whereas some modalities of boredom
can be understood as a passive resignation to the status quo, or defensive
responses to the shocks and dislocations of modernity, others might harbour
kernels of critical insight and praxis. For, in his inimitably dialectical way,
Lefebvre always reminds us that, even in the most apparently trivial or
degraded of human experiences, there reside latently emancipatory
possibilities.
Given the deterioration of creative work under capitalism, and the
emergence of a privatized consciousness, it is understandable that many
individuals seek escape from the monotony and dreariness of daily life in
leisure pursuits. Yet, Lefebvre is adamant that leisure cannot be separated
arbitrarily from other spheres of social life, especially work: So we work to
earn our leisure, and leisure only has one meaning: to get away from work.
A vicious circle (Lefebvre, 1991a: 40). As both Hegel and Marx pointed
out, necessity does not disappear in the realm of freedom. Indeed,
Lefebvre argues that the commodification of leisure activities is an essential
component of the shift from production to consumption in post-war capital-
ism. Modernity creates specific (though debased) needs, that can only be
satisfied through the accumulation of commodified objects, images and
experiences. The visions and fantasies projected in advertising offer a mere
simulation of non-alienated pleasure and fulfilment, thereby replacing real
unhappiness by fictions of happiness (Lefebvre, 1991a: 35). And, as
he notes in the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, although real
physical drudgery might be largely absent from domestic or other tasks
in the Western world today, because of labour-saving devices and
cyberneticization, this hardly solves the problem of modern work.
Although the middle and upper classes took to intensified leisure pursuits
and the accumulation of sensations as an escape from the routinization of
modern life as early as the 19th century, indulging in detective fiction,
travel or collecting, the time of leisure and that of the machine remains
effectively the same. This explains Lefebvres pithy suggestion that to get
bored you need leisure (1995: 353).
As Lars Svendsen notes in A Philosophy of Boredom (2005: 61),
modernity valorizes the notion of self-actualization, in which every element
of life and experience must have personal value, implying in turn that life
itself must always be interesting. (It is certainly worth noting that the
words boredom and interesting came into being historically at roughly the
same time.) For Svendsen, the existential burden to always be interesting,
and to continually find things of interest, is an often insurmountable task,
leaving us frustrated and ultimately bored. This chimes with Lefebvres
argument that the cult of the interesting ^ the sensational, the important,
the unusual, the amusing, the absorbing ^ is linked to the hyper-stimula-
tion of modern culture, which, because it quickly reaches a saturation
point, is merely the flip-side of boredom. Modern boredom raises the prob-
lem of style in life ^ which must be delineated sharply from the mere adop-
tion of commodified lifestyles (Lefebvre, 1995: 278, 353). According to
Lefebvre, consumer activities per se do not allow natural cycles into the
mix, or cater to genuine creativity and embodied engagement, and hence
fail to produce authentically maximal difference (so-called because it
retains transformative potential, unlike minimal differences, which are
merely symbolic contrasts that can be easily co-opted by the culture
industry).
In mechanical repetition, the hallmark of modern labour, all that can
be produced is isolated things or objects with quantifiable exchange-values,
but not what Lefebvre calls oeuvres. By the oeuvre, he means the creation
of artworks, philosophy or even entire cities, along with their attendant
use-values, through the free (and indeed playful) appropriation of space
and time, which is starkly opposed to the purely technical mastery of mate-
rial nature which produces products and exchange values (1996: 175^6).
What we have lost is the capacity for properly aesthetic experience, under-
stood in the original Greek sense of aisthesis, a shared corporeal disclosure
of the sensible world through which notions of meaning and value are for-
mulated. The life-long process of cultivating particular tastes and knowl-
edges through a process of finely honed discernment and the continuous
education of desire has been replaced by the ever-accelerating yet essen-
tially passive accumulation of images and entertainments. In this endless
search for novelty and the constant hyper-stimulation that results, we inha-
bit an ambient psychological state that is marked by innumerable lightning
transitions from interest to tedium (Lefebvre, 1995: 165^6). What is fleet-
ingly fashionable is, in reality, the deceptive outer shell of an eternal same-
ness. Lefebvre identifies the connection between stimulation and boredom
as one of the hidden dialectical movements of modernity: what we identify
as interesting, he says, is a short-lived phenomenon. It is quickly
exhausted. The interesting becomes boring (1995: 260; see also Anderson,
2004).
The manic search for novelty that accompanies untrammelled consum-
erism is undoubtedly one of the most common responses to mass boredom
for Lefebvre, but hardly the only noteworthy one. Although suggestions
that entire nations are sinking into a boredom at zero point might smack
of hyperbole, Lefebvre is arguably correct to say that boredom has now
reached a state of such intimate familiarity that we often fail to recognize
that we are bored (1984: 186; see also Svendsen, 2005: 14). In other words,
we are seemingly comfortable with being bored, in which case it might be
said to function as a kind of protective psychic layer, like Simmels blase atti-
tude, or Benjamins striking image of boredom as a warm grey cloth that
envelops and benumbs us. This can insulate us from some of the brutalities
and uncertainties of the modern world, but at the cost of refusing the exis-
tential onus of commitment, passion and engagement. Alternatively, we
find ways of accepting the apparently permanent character of boredom, and
cope with it accordingly. In a fascinating (if highly compressed) discussion,
Lefebvre suggests that what he calls (oddly) Anglo-Saxon humour might
well be a way to contend with the mundane triviality that typically marks
the modern everyday, because it softens the coarse unpleasantness and pal-
pable unfairness that most people experience in their day-to-day lives.
Humour provides, if not exactly adventure, romance or transcendence, a
quiet reassurance that things could be worse, a kind of Dunkirk spirit
for the soul, which might be the last refuge of what he calls, disparagingly,
po-faced decency (Lefebvre, 1995: 35). Recourse to such humour seemingly
resolves the contradictions and indignities of everyday life, but in a tempo-
rary or illusory way, and hence can only be palliative.
Another, apparently more Gallic response, not available to the more
prosaically minded Anglophone denizens of the modern world (or so it
would seem, since Lefebvres tongue might be firmly planted in cheek
here), would be to savour boredom ^ or, to be more precise, ennui ^ as
something akin to the leisurely sipping of a fine wine. What Lefebvre
terms the French road to ennui implies a quasi-aristocratic cultivation of
world-weariness and cynical detachment, one imbued with considerable nos-
talgia for what Bertolt Brecht once called the bad old days. The person in
the grip of ennui struggles against the [modern] boredom of an absence of
style [by] trying to turn the clock back, exhuming old styles, myths and
symbols from a pre-capitalist past. But this sort of response is equally a
dead-end, inasmuch as it represents the boredom of youth without a
future. [W]ill you be content simply to pick your ironic and philosophical
way through all these boredoms?, Lefebvre asks rhetorically. Or perhaps
to invent a new one, just right for the occasion, the exquisite boredom of
the never-ending dinner party with its overpolite host, the boredom of shat-
tered pride, tinged with the subtle hues of intellectuality? (1995: 92, 124^5).
Such overly intellectualized responses to the subjective malaise of
modernity is exemplified by what Lefebvre considers to be the ill-consid-
ered nihilism of the existentialist, which for him is symptomatic of a priva-
tized, petty-bourgeois individualism that never gets beyond a narcissistic
and somewhat juvenile expression of despair. It is worth noting that
Lefebvre expressly rejects the idea of Alltglichkeit as espoused by
Heidegger and the early Luka cs, inasmuch as they tend to regard the every-
day as the natural domain of the anonymous masses, with their middling
thoughts and inconsequential actions, wherein the mundanity of daily life
can only be transcended philosophically by a heroically enlightened few.
This stance is, for Lefebvre, unnecessarily pessimistic and profoundly anti-
democratic: existentialismdispossesses mundane, everyday existence, annul-
ling it, denying it. It is the very thing which denies life: it is the nothingness
of anguish, of vertigo, of fascination (1991a: 125). A good example of this
line of thinking is Heideggers notion of profound or authentic boredom.
Boredom for Heidegger is not the result of any sort of objective causality,
but rather a fundamental mood or region of experience. Whereas the anon-
ymous person in the street is prone to ordinary boredom, more elevated
forms gradually reveal to the cognoscenti a connection between everyday-
ness and inauthenticity, paving the way for an attunement with the primor-
dial character of Being (see Heidegger, 1995: 74^175, 1998: 87).
As Goodstein points out, although Heidegger developed a finely
observed phenomenological account of the lived experience of boredom, it
remains abstract and overly philosophical, and functions ultimately to rein-
scribe the elitist distinction between the mundane boredom of everyday
existence and the deep boredom that leads to metaphysical questions
(2005: 283). Although strongly influenced by certain aspects of Heideggers
thought (see Elden, 2004), Lefebvre would likely concur with Goodstein.
He believes that the boredom of an alienated everyday life can be largely
(though not completely) overcome, but only through the concerted exercise
of a transformative praxis imbued with a popular collective will. For
Lefebvre, the everyday is not inherently authentic or inauthentic; rather,
it is the fundamental terrain on which broader human feelings, pleasures
and intentions are realized and subject to a process of (necessarily incom-
plete) authentication. Such attitudes as nostalgia, nihilism or cynicism are
for Lefebvre symptoms of the belief that the everyday is an unalterable
given, that there are no utopian alternatives to the present organization of
society, and that humanitys youth lies in the past, not the future. Not sur-
prisingly, he accepts none of these premises as valid: When the world the
sun shines on is always new, how could everyday life [seem] forever
unchangeable, unchangeable in its boredom, its greyness, its repetition of
the same actions? (Lefebvre, 1991a: 228).
Lefebvre similarly rejects what he calls aestheticism as a solution to
the problem of boredom. Aestheticism, by his reckoning, understands art
as a privileged activity detached from the everyday, an attitude which
cannot protect one from boredom, but merely obscure or sublimate it.
Here, Lefebvre is thinking of art as a specialized practice, and the bourgeois
ethos of art for arts sake, which for him is a side-effect of fragmented
and alienated labour, and can only provide the illusion of a genuine style of
life. Only in rejecting aestheticism can we fully embrace art as an authentic
model for living ^ that is, fulfil art by superseding it, and by integrating it
into the fabric of a revivified everyday life (see Lege r, 2006). Beautiful lan-
guage, artistic style and aestheticism are merely the end-products of an
alienation, the alienation of the logos, and the artist has become the high
priest of the logos, its magus, or simply its mandarin (Lefebvre, 1995:
176). This explains why Lefebvre does not regard Surrealism as a viable cri-
tique of everyday life. Although he was attracted initially to this movement,
and attended meetings of the so-called Bureau of Surrealist Inquiries in
the 1920s, Lefebvre eventually concluded that Surrealism cultivated the
bizarre and the marvellous as ends in themselves, and hence did not break
decisively enough from what Benjamin called the phantasmagoria of the
commodity. Surrealisms attack on bourgeois life remained abstract and
mystified, and, by restricting itself to the aesthetic plane, represented an
ersatz bohemianism that offered no real threat to the established order
(Lefebvre, 1991a: 123).
All these adaptations and responses to boredom fall short for Lefebvre
because they do not envisage going beyond the privatized life experience
that is typical of, though by no means restricted to, the educated middle
classes of the Western metropole. Yet, even in the most confused and alien-
ated consciousness, there are moments of genuine insight. In the realm of
the modern everyday, the default position might well be that of monotony
and banality. For instance, most conversations, says Lefebvre, are concerned
with such neutral topics as the weather, neighbours or friends. Although
such dialogues are generally uninteresting and repetitive, they do signify a
desire to exchange something other than mere things (2002: 313).
However, the apparently trivial can shift without warning into topics of
real interest, replete with deeper significances. Here, speech becomes
savage, slips through the bonds of hidebound rules and regulations, spray-
paints itself on the walls of our cities. Our words are then suddenly over-
saturated with meaning, on the cusp of great truths and poetic insights. At
such moments, we experience intense risk, in passion and poetry, [where]
daily life shatters, and something different comes through with the work,
whether act, speech or object (Lefebvre, 2005: 95). We would like to con-
tinue, to explore further this sudden richness that might pull us out of the
banality of self-absorption and the greyness of the everyday, but we typically
lack the resources to carry this desire forward.
The central point here is that, for Lefebvre, daily life is simulta-
neously humble and sordid and rich in potential; it is the space-time of vol-
untary programmed self-regulation, but also utopian possibility. Despite
all the attacks it is subjected to, the everyday remains the locus of all real
creativity, the alpha and omega of what it means to be human. There is a
power concealed in everyday lifes apparent banality, a depth beyond its
triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness (Lefebvre, 1984:
72, 37). In the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre sug-
gests that there are different levels or layers of awareness when it comes to
our understanding of the ambiguous textures of everyday life, and that we
respond to its admixture of deprivations, boredoms and possibilities in cor-
respondingly divergent ways. He suggests a subtle but detectable movement
in consciousness from sheer complacency and resignation, through nagging
but still mystified discomforts and questions, to non-adaption, of vague
rejections and unrecognized voids, of hesitations and misunderstandings.
In the half-dreams and little everyday miracles of the latter, there are glim-
merings of alternative ways of living and being (Lefebvre, 2002: 59, 60).
Such reveries are seemingly private and hidden, yet at the same time open
potentially to wider historical and social forces, and hence pregnant with
other possibilities. These are threshold moments, and can be likened to
Benjamins dream-bird of boredom that hatches the egg of experience
(Benjamin, 1968: 91).
The Aleatory and the Utopian Moment
This complex mixture of ambiguity, obfuscation and insight that marks our
everyday consciousness brings us to a fuller consideration of those interrup-
tions of empty, homogeneous time that are replete with other, possibly uto-
pian resonances. In the course of his discussion of the new town
mentioned earlier, Lefebvre contrasts the noisy but dull repetitiveness of
modern boredom, marked by a time that is simultaneously full in a quanti-
tative sense and bereft of meaning, with another, older form. In the latter,
there was a certain languidness, a luxurious stretching out of temporal expe-
rience, in which stories could be told, wine or coffee sipped and savoured,
games played and pastimes indulged in, and unhurried conversations held.
The new town is certainly the epitome of modern boredom, but in earlier
times there existed a different kind of boredom, one that might shade into
experiences of genuine leisure or idleness (see Barthes, 1985). This older
form of boredom, writes Lefebvre:
had something soft and cosy about it, like Sundays with the family, comfort-
ing and carefree. There was always something to talk about, always some-
thing to do. Life was lived in slow motion, life was lived there. Now it is
just boring, the pure essence of boredom. (1995: 118)
In The Storyteller, as mentioned, Benjamin argues that narratives
can neither be told nor assimilated properly through relaxed and ancestral
repetition if we are not in the appropriate state of mental relaxation, of a
sort the boredom found typically in pre-capitalist societies made possible.
This is starkly opposed to the manic, enervated boredom of the modern
world, and the somnambulistic mode of distraction that accompanies it.
But the attenuation of experience in the contemporary age has meant a
precipitous decline in the art of waiting, and the result is often impotent
frustration, anger and impatience (see Schweitzer, 2008). As Benjamin
reminds us, we are bored in a good way when we are waiting, but we dont
know precisely what for, a mode of interruption that changes the very
nature of temporal experience itself. Rather than strive to kill time, we
should invite it in, convert it into charged expectation of a sort that can
reveal genuinely new horizons and challenges, where the future reaches
into the present, touches it, and saturates it with otherness. Hence, a certain
kind of boredom is important for both Benjamin and Lefebvre, because it
represents what the former calls (in The Arcades Project) a Trojan horse,
by which a gradual mode of awakening can stealthily enter our commodified
dreamworld and transform it into dialectical possibility.
Lefebvre directly addresses the question of how the vague dissatisfac-
tions we usually associate with boredom can elide into other, more transfor-
mational instances, so that we can better understand our human
propensities for passionate engagement, play and the ludic (such as in the
festival), the pleasurable and the aesthetic. To illustrate this, he draws on
an argument made by information theorists that the production of new
meaning is balanced between sheer repetition and chaotic randomness.
What Lefebvre calls the pleonasm ^ the pointless repetition of signs that
is easily understood, but which generates no new insight ^ is clearly one
gateway to boredom for him. But a situation that presents a set of possibili-
ties that are so completely open and unstructured as to render unfathomable
the link to concrete praxis tends to induce a fatalistic, debilitating melan-
choly which is, in effect, another type of boredom. Between these two
extremes lies a range of potentialities that are neither completely open-
ended nor wholly determined, and this is what Lefebvre calls the aleatory.
The concept of the aleatory draws implicitly on Marxs famous passage
from the 18th Brumaire, which supposes that human action is neither
rooted in absolute contingency, disconnected from socio-historical factors,
nor rigidly and blindly determined. Rather, it represents a dialectical unity
linking necessity and chance, where chance expresses a necessity and neces-
sity expresses itself via a network of chances (Lefebvre, 1995: 203). Just as
there is no hidden hand of the marketplace (and goodness knows what the
other hand is up to), for Lefebvre there is no Hegelian cunning of history.
A knowledge of the aleatory prevents overcaution and hesitation, and hence
can enhance transformative potentialities, but also alerts us to dangers of
hubris and the ever-present possibility of failure. Hence, boredom and
indifference can only be avoided if we see the present as laden with real pos-
sibilities for different ways of living, but not wholly unrealistic aspirations
that can never be achieved. As Lefebvre writes: Between the world which
is chock-a-block full of realism and positivism, and the gaping world of
pure negativity and nihilism, our aim is to discover the open world, the
world of what is possible (2002: 263).
There is, for Lefebvre, no sudden and definitive leap from the realm
of necessity into freedom, nor any possibility of complete dis-alienation.
Nonetheless, there are times when tangible prospects for thorough-going
social transformation hove vividly into view. This is what Lefebvre calls the
moment, a flash of insight into the range of historical possibilities that
are embedded in the totality of being, but that cannot be disentangled
from the activities of everyday life. These are manifestations of what could
be termed everyday utopianism (see Gardiner, 1995, 2004). The moment
generates a tragic consciousness because most of these potentials will
remain tantalizingly unfulfilled or only partially realized, although such
failures are never complete or for all time. The theory of moments,
Lefebvre writes, may permit us to illuminate the slow stages by which
need becomes desire, deep below everyday life, and on its surface. [They
may] resolve the age-old conflict between the everyday and tragedy, and
between triviality and Festival (2002: 358).
For all his ambivalence regarding modernity, Lefebvre acknowledges
that the idea of somehow returning to the pre-modern communities of the
past can only lead to the cul-de-sac of reactionary, even fascist politics.
Although he has often been accused of romanticizing pre-modern forms of
social life, and of viewing the contemporary everyday as irredeemably shal-
low and corrupted, a careful reading of the widest possible range of his
texts reveals a much more nuanced and defensible position (see Gardiner,
2004). Lefebvre occasionally evinces a certain nostalgia for pre-capitalist
communities, and their richly complex and fully integrated styles of life.
Yet, he is equally cognizant that, although we can learn from the past and
strive to realize its promises at an unspecifiable future time, we are com-
pelled to work with the tools the modern world hands us, even if we might
be desperately at odds with the manner in which it is currently constituted.
He borrows freely from the Romantic tradition, affirming it as the funda-
mental ground base of both individual rebellion and social transformation,
but Lefebvre is equally wary of the debilitating nostalgia of much
Romanticism, with its mix of fatalism, ennui and quixotic desire to restore
an irretrievably bygone state of affairs. We may well continue to have our
(legitimately) wistful regrets and longings with respect to the world we
have lost, but Lefebvre believes ultimately that what is needed today is a
new or revolutionary Romanticism, one that is oriented expressly towards
the future (see Lwy and Sayre, 2001: 221^5).
The key, then, is to grasp and nurture the transformative possibilities
that inhere in modernity, but without succumbing to a naive progressivism.
For Lefebvre, such a project entails the cultivation of a profound sense of
irony, albeit of a specific type. Although irony has existed since time imme-
morial, in modern times it is the purview of all, not only of the educated
and leisured classes; we live, as Goodstein reminds us, in an era of mass or
democratized scepticism. Maieutic, the technique of Socratic doubt and
questioning, and the main vehicle of irony, has become generalized: Now
[irony] belongs to everyone: writers, artists, architects, political activists,
the masses, the classes (Lefebvre, 1995: 15). To make choices in a world of
risk and uncertainty, to embrace this or that, requires a distancing,
a standing back and cool-headed appraisal, of a sort that irony makes possi-
ble. Irony is invaluable here because it exposes the field of possibilities in
the modern world, of their multiplicity, of the necessity of opting and the
risk every option involves (Lefebvre, 1995: 3). As such, it is linked strongly
to the aleatory. It is an ironical consciousness that allows us to prise open
the gap between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome, and is
hence the resolute enemy of dissembling, fatuous self-regard and pomposity,
unquestioned dogmatism and naively facile optimism.
The early Romantics might have mastered the use of irony in the
modern era, but because it never leaves the hermeticism of a self-referential
subjectivity Romanticism eschews an understanding of the underlying
socio-economic transformations that are necessary to correct the real
sources of subjective malaise (Lefebvre, 1995: 18). As such, Romanticism
is vulnerable to pathological forms of obsessive introspection, of which bore-
dom is one symptom, and that can easily lead to the sort of existential
dread and anxiety that Sartre and others philosophized about. Benjamin,
incidentally, came to the same conclusion: Romanticism ends in a theory
of boredom, the characteristically modern sentiment (1999b: 110). For
Lefebvre, however, the perpetuum mobile of such an insular subjectivity
is not an inevitable consequence of a modern selfhood grounded in scepti-
cism and critical reflection. Yet, we can only break out of this quietistic ego-
centricity through the cultivation of a Marxist irony, one that affirms the
absolute reality of the pre-existing physical world, and that views conscious-
ness itself as an irreducibly social phenomenon. This form of irony encour-
ages us to intervene in the world, change situations, develop specific
objects and aims with respect to either action or knowledge, but remains
cognizant of the arcane and sometimes mysterious movement of the
dialectic.
The alternative to what Lefebvre refers to as the boredom of dogmatic
Marxism is, therefore, a critical (and self-critical) Marxist thought that
cleaves neither to an unmoored Romantic subjectivism or the brutal neces-
sitarianism of Hegelian logic and other determinisms. Official Marxisms
were fatally compromised because they were incapable of grasping the ines-
capably tragic dimension of human life, and the perennial gap between is
and ought, such as the Stalinist predilection for a new Communist man of
robust good cheer, oodles of decency and deadpan earnestness. For
Lefebvre, what is just as lamentable as the cynical cafe existentialist is the
good person, whether bourgeois or worker, who harbours no trace of subjec-
tive depth or ironical awareness. The festival of the decent fellow has
become a meaningless profession of faith in a relentlessly facile optimism
and stick-to-itiveness, a watchword for banality and boredom, of which the
current glut of self-help books and aspirations to blissful if effortless and
cost-free happiness might be considered emblematic (Lefebvre, 1995: 34).
Marxist irony clears the air of such mystifications and ideological dead-
ends because it recognizes that in every situation there is an element of
give, of play and openness, but also shuns the cult of pure spontaneism.
It makes judgements and choices, but equally respects the aleatory, and
knows that failure is always a possible outcome; it affirms the ineluctably
tragic nature of existence, but without succumbing to a self-absorbed mel-
ancholia. In short, Marxist irony can help us to resist the corrosive cynicism,
indifference and boredom that infects the modern world.
Lefebvre acknowledges that certain critics will attack this emphasis on
irony as a form of subjectivistic idealism. To sidestep this, he distinguishes
between idealist versus concrete forms of utopianism, the latter of which
is strongly linked to irony. The Socratic metaphor of philosophy as midwife,
of easing the pains by which a new world and novel ways of thinking are
brought into being, has an undeniably utopian resonance. As he says, the
maieutic of modernity is not without a certain utopianism (1995: 45, italics
in original). Nor is this sort of utopianism to be confused with the pseudo-
utopia of the perfect state ruled by beneficent reason. Absolute determin-
isms of all stripes have to be cast aside; or, put differently, we need to
embrace utopianism, understood as a mode of imagining that desires and
perpetually reaches out for a different and better life, but in the full knowl-
edge that perfection or completion is endlessly deferred, and thankfully so.
This is opposed resolutely to any given and necessarily static vision of
utopia, which is a form of conceptual and methodological closure that can
be positively dangerous, when it is not merely facile or obsolete (see
Jacoby, 2005). In Lefebvres new utopianism, the imagination is becoming
a lived experience, something experimental; instead of combating or repress-
ing rationality, it is incorporating it. Only a kind of reasoned but dialectical
use of utopianism will permit us to illuminate the present in the name of
the future (Lefebvre, 1995: 357).
Conclusion
If lively discussions with my students over the past several years are any
indication, perhaps an effective way to dispel boredom is simply to talk
about it ^ even in academic settings that, as Amir Baghdadchi (2005) has
observed, are capable of generating a unique form of boredom. (Doubtless,
every professor secretly fears the appearance of the dreaded word boring
on anonymous student evaluations.) In The Philosophy of Boredom, Lars
Svendson notes similarly that although his pupils are often perplexed when
it comes to comprehending such previously well-known philosophical ideas
as anxiety, judging them to be remote and arcane concerns, students today
recognize instantly the experience of boredom, which exercises a peculiar
fascination for them. According to Svendson, this is indicative of a profound
socio-cultural shift in Western societies, wherein boredom has become our
affectual base-line, a kind of default setting of mood that is so familiar to
us ^ again, the cosy embrace of Benjamins warm, grey cloth ^ that we
need to be jolted out of a routinized state of boredom to be able to recognize
it as such. Because in modernity there is no substantial distinction between
the significant and the insignificant, writes Svendsen, everything becomes
equally interesting and as a result equally boring (2005: 61).
That this topic is widely considered to be anything but boring might
also be evinced in a rapidly growing body of scholarly literature, a good
example being the recent collection Essays on Boredom and Modernity,
edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (2008). My sense is that
although Lefebvres ideas on this score can be seen to dovetail thematically,
and to a certain extent methodologically with many aspects of this emerging
sub-field of boredom studies, in other respects he remains an unsettling
and perhaps unrecuperable presence. In the concluding remarks that
follow, I propose to explore why this is arguably the case, through a brief
consideration of Harvie Fergusons 2009 book Self-Identity and Everyday
Life, which contains a discussion of boredom. It is hoped that this exercise
will clarify the nature and potential of Lefebvres contribution to the current
debate over this issue.
Fergusons analysis in Self-Identity and Everyday Life grows out of his
earlier study of Kierkegaards critique of modernity, the latter touching on
boredom only in passing, focusing instead on the related (but not identical)
phenomenon of melancholia (Ferguson, 1995). Although part of Routledges
The New Sociology series, each title of which contains the phrase everyday
life, Fergusons more recent book is distinctive because he does not treat
the everyday as an unproblematic backdrop against which theoretical discus-
sions of the body or globalization are foregrounded. Rather, his explicit
goal is to treat the everyday critically and as a substantive topic in its own
right, to tease out its genealogies, mutations and correlative effects in the
context of late modernity. Yet, although the everyday has lately come to
be established as a key concept vis-a-vis our understanding of the social
world, Fergusons central argument is that it cannot be grasped as a clearly
identifiable set of practices, attitudinal dispositions or forms of conscious-
ness. This is because everyday life is something of an anti-concept: it is an
ill-defined region of raw, fragmentary and essentially unmediated experi-
ence into which all concepts dissolve (Ferguson, 2009: 34). Such an inchoate
and non-identical domain can only be approached apophatically, a stance
reminiscent of Lefebvres suggestion that the everyday is that largely invisi-
ble residue remaining after other, more specialized activities have been sin-
gled out and accounted for (1991a: 85, also 2002: 64).
The everyday, insofar as it can be described at all, is for Ferguson the
unbounded, obscure and mundane background from which identities arise
and in relation to which the self-synthesis of experience is formed (2009:
39). However, the formation of self-identity in the daily regime of contempo-
rary societies has been rendered problematic, not least because the formerly
stable linkages between selfhood, identity and the everyday are becoming
increasingly fractured ^ indeed, they are now at best seen as unrelated, or
even antagonistic, processes (2009: 8). The notion that society constitutes
the site where all the myriad particularities of daily life are sutured together
to form coherent and stable structures and patterns of action is one that
has to be abandoned; such a received concept of the social has, in this
sense, become the proverbial emperor with no clothes (see also Bauman,
2005: 374). Since there is no overarching cohesiveness vis-a-vis social life
today, the synthetic unity of the subjects experience unravels. The so-
called postmodern turn merely reflects a heightened awareness of such
perpetual flux and dislocation. This insight leads Ferguson to a relatively
sustained consideration of boredom, which, pace Goodstein et al., he
views as an archetypally modern experience ^ it is, as Benjamin also
noted, the everyday made manifest. In such a world, daily life becomes
a here and now of banal and mundane activities (shopping, commuting
and so forth) which, although occasionally punctuated by more unusual
or unexpected events, is marked above all by a succession of hazy and
largely indefinable moods. Indeed, the constant processing and modula-
tion of these free floating moods, of a sort unanchored in particular con-
texts or activities, is the contemporary everyday for Ferguson. As such,
the modern, Romantic project of self-actualization surrenders to the non-
identical, which finds its generic form in boredom (Ferguson, 2009: 168).
Evoking the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, Ferguson suggests that
in the general indifference of boredom, we find what is perhaps the last
realm of inclusive experience left to us, a null point of radical equality
that, paradoxically, does contain certain potentialities. Boredom, he con-
cludes, is the truth of modern life (2009: 171).
Towards the end of his exposition, Ferguson hints that the nihility of
boredom constitutes something of a blank slate from which new move-
ments and surpassings can spring forth, opening up a hitherto obscured
wonderland of ontological playfulness. Yet, from within the parameters
of his account, it is difficult to envisage such a possibility. Part of the
reason for this is that such moods as boredom are, for Ferguson, floating,
decontextualized, and indefinite states of being (2009: 168), and are
hence wholly detached from material or socio-historical conditions. In the
third volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre appears to make
a similar point when he states that conventional social science cannot
easily comprehend or analyse boredom, because the latter is an ambiguous
and shifting affective state that does not conform easily to the received
notion of social facts ^ which, ironically, has not stopped legions of psy-
chologists, criminologists and sociologists from trying to quantify and
measure boredom (see Klapp, 1986). Despite its seemingly nebulous
and changeable quality, however, what is valuable about Lefebvres
approach to boredom is that he does not confine the experience of bore-
dom to the phenomenological level. Although it might seem to be a
wholly ineffable and hence incommunicable experience, boredom for
Lefebvre is symptomatic of deeper social currents that can be uncovered
and grasped theoretically. Although Ferguson might be correct in assum-
ing that the contemporary social world is marked by experiential flux,
indeterminacy and fragmentation, Lefebvre would argue that, alongside
such dispersions and polycentralities, there are equally strong tendencies
towards integration, homogenization and the consolidation of hierarchies,
due to the relentless global logic of capital accumulation, which imparts a
certain uniformity to social experience. The latter would include the appli-
cation of bureaucratic reason to all of time/space (clock time, global trans-
portation and telecommunications systems, market research and polling
data, linearly repetitive tasks, universal application of positive knowl-
edge, domination of the abstract through generalized exchange and so
on), as well as the creation of innumerable stratifications and hierarchies
with respect to knowledges, techniques and functions (Lefebvre, 2005:
85^8). None of these factors are in any way incompatible with the ascen-
dance of neoliberalism. In the maelstrom of such antagonistic forces, how-
ever, Lefebvre believes that there remain distinct possibilities for the
realization of genuine forms of sociability marked by unity in difference,
the enhancement of individual and collective agency, and the enrichment
of radical democracy, although these can only occur through dialectical
oppositions and conflicts that can never be prefigured in advance.
In every corner of Western society, Lefebvre argues, people are des-
perately seeking satisfaction and the avoidance of boredom, through a wide
array of adaptations, self-help techniques and sincere (if largely ineffectual)
resistances. In the main, these fail because they do not go beyond the con-
fines of our privatized and commodified life experience. They are by turns
palliative, accommodating or frustrated, evincing only a partial and mysti-
fied understanding of how the economic system induces the homogenization
and quantification of space and time, developments about which Ferguson
has very little to say. In seeking to prise open the crack for freedom to slip
through, Lefebvre argues that we need to analyse boredom by recourse to
a critical dialectical method (1995: 124). This is hardly straightforward: his
ambivalence about boredom manifests itself in a wide range of intellectual
responses to it across a number of different texts. But his writings do
convey the possibility of a successful working through of boredom, so as
to arrive at higher states of awareness and a better understanding of the
link to a potentially transformative praxis, which would require a more pro-
ficient grasp of the aleatory, as filtered through a healthy dose of Marxist
irony. This avenue might prove to be a more tangible and effective prophy-
lactic against modern forms of boredom than Fergusons call for ontological
playfulness ^ or at least a rejigging of boredoms default position, if
hardly an outright cure, as if such a thing were possible. Lefebvre is
enough of a Marxist, albeit a distinctly heretical one, to suppose that many
human problems are not eternal aspects of the human condition, but histor-
ically contingent ones that have their (at least partial) solution in practice
rather than endless philosophical hand-wringing, or the pervasive distrac-
tions of aestheticism, consumption or mysticism. This stance seems to be
at the heart of his concrete utopianism. And perhaps it is here that we
might witness a renewed emphasis on the pleasures and desires of the
body, or even the resurrection of the genuine festival ^ in short, a revivifica-
tion of the overarching totality that constitutes everyday life itself, of a
kind glimpsed only furtively in such moments as the Paris Commune or
May 68. Ultimately, for Lefebvre, it is a matter of:
a slow but profound modification of the everyday ^ of a new usage of the
body, of time and space, of sociability; something that implies a social and
political project; more enhanced forms of democracy, such as direct democ-
racy in cities; definitions of a new citizenship ^ decentralization; participa-
tory self-management (autogestion); and so on ^ that is, a project for
society that is at the same time cultural, social, and political. Is this uto-
pian? Yes, because utopian thought concerns what is and is not possible.
All thinking that has to do with action has a utopian element. Ideals that
stimulate action, such as liberty and happiness, must contain a utopian ele-
ment. This is not a refutation of such ideals; it is, rather, a necessary condi-
tion of the project of changing life. (1988: 86^7)
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Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor in Sociology at the University of
Western Ontario, Canada. His books include the edited four-volume collec-
tion Mikhail Bakhtin: Masters of Modern Social Thought (Sage, 2003),
Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and the Human
Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with Michael M. Bell), The
Dialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology
(Routledge, 1992), and a special double issue of the journal Cultural
Studies, with the title Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing Turned
Itself Inside Out (co-edited with Gregory J. Seigworth; Routledge, 2004),
as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters dedicated to dialogi-
cal social theory, ethics, everyday life and utopianism. Forthcoming works
include Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Peter Lang,
2012). [email: megardin@uwo.ca]

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