Boredom Escapes Us: A Cultural Collage in Eleven Storeys

Abstract

Few sociologists have addressed the concept of boredom despite interest in the subject and experience of boredom from psychology, philosophy, the arts and popular culture. Classical sociological concepts of alienation, anomie and disenchantment are related to boredom, but do not address it directly. The history of the word boredom itself is not clear, though it appears it was first used in the late 19th century. Most authors agree that an increase in individualism and the concomitant rise in secularization, combined with industrial changes in labour and increased bureaucracy, help to explain a perceived increase in the experience of boredom. This dissertation is a phenomenological exploration of boredom, informed by the writings of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin on the subject. Inspired by Benjamin’s method of literary montage, from his monumental Passagenwerk, I construct a cultural collage of the subject of boredom. I use the metaphor of storeys (the levels of a building) as an organizing device to construct the empirical work of this project. These storeys include a consideration and analysis of: billboards, internet advertising, the reflections of an overseas development worker, art installations, a poem, a greeting card, a play, song lyrics and Kafka’s short story character, the hunger artist. Each storey serves to inspire a sociological meditation on the subject of boredom, all of which are grounded in the historical, social and philosophical reviews in the first four chapters. These extensive reviews, as well as the eleven storeys, contribute a preliminary sociological analysis of the ambiguous yet ubiquitous experience of boredom in modernity.