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DOI: 10.1177/0263276411417460 2012 29: 37Theory Culture Society

Michael E. GardinerHenri Lefebvre and the 'Sociology of Boredom'

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Henri Lefebvre and theSociology 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

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On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom, andthe critique of everyday life has a sociology of boredom as part of itsagenda. (Lefebvre, 2002: 75)

IF MANY of my academic colleagues are to be believed, boredom is asuperficially fleeting and essentially psychological condition that canbe dispelled easily by a brisk walk or arresting diversion. Such mildpsychic disturbances can hardly be the purview of a rigorous social scienceconcerned with altogether weightier issues, and the reassurance of dealingwith such solid, measurable facts as income disparities or the rate of violentcrime. One of the ironies of this attitude is that boredom has been subjectedto considerable scrutiny by a wide range of writers and philosophers in themodern 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 psychologicalstate 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 culturalfactors. This implies that boredom is a mass phenomenon, and that it canbe interpreted as a touchstone through which we can grasp wider anxietiesand societal changes, especially how our lived, embodied experience of timehas been transformed in the modern world (see Goodstein, 2005; DallePezze and Salzani, 2008; Spacks, 1995).

As important as this research has been in redirecting our gaze towardsthe sociological constitution of boredom, what it lacks is an awareness thatif boredom is an historically contingent mood or condition, then it can beat least partly superseded, especially if we realize that boredom itselfmight occasionally harbour flashes of subversive insight and the seeds oftransformational praxis. Even in her path-breaking Experience withoutQualities: Boredom and Modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein shies away fromexplicit 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. Forexample, in such texts as The Storyteller and the Convolute D sectionof 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 samenessthat induces boredom in the modern subject. Yet, paradoxically, certainmanifestations 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 HenriLefebvres comparable treatment of the same topic is notable by its completeabsence. This situation is, arguably, symptomatic of the relative neglect ofLefebvres ideas in Anglo-American circles until recently, at least outsidecertain currents of critical geography and broad historical surveys of post-war French socio-political thought. Given the relative inattention paid toLefebvres work generally, and especially in this area, my central purposewill be to explore his embryonic sociology of boredom, and to treat it as asignificant but as yet unexamined component of his overarching critiqueof everyday life.

When referring to the everyday, Lefebvre invokes G.W.F. Hegelsmaxim The familiar is not necessarily the known. In so doing, Lefebvre isstriving 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 timesubstantial and fecund, everyday life is the crucial foundation upon whichthe so-called higher activities of human beings, including abstract cognitionand practical objectifications, are premised.We must therefore be concernedabove all with redeeming its hidden and oft-suppressed potentials(Lefebvre, 1991a: 87). Furthermore, Lefebvres approach contrasts withmany phenomenological approaches in its insistence that everyday life hasa specific history, one that is intimately bound up with the dynamics ofmodernity, and hence riven with numerous contradictions and marked by aconsiderable degree of ambiguity and internal complexity. For Lefebvre,everyday life, understood as an identifiable domain or attitude seeminglydistinct from more specialized actions and knowledges, is a product of themodern world itself.

This general orientation applies equally to his conceptualization ofboredom. But although Lefebvre was keenly interested in boredom and itscognates (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, ellipticaland seemingly contradictory ways. Such an apparent lack of precisionreveals 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 SituationistInternational that boredom is irredeemably counter-revolutionary ^ thateveryday 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 moreaffirmatory way, inasmuch as they are pregnant with desires, frustratedfrenzies, [and] unrealized possibilities (Lefebvre, 1995: 124). Indeed, inthe 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 latentconnections between certain forms of boredom and utopian propensities.These conjoinings caught the attention not only of Benjamin but alsoErnst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and others (see Osborne, 2006).

In the following discussion, I will begin by examining the broaderconditions of modernity that have arguably given rise to the contemporaryexperience of boredom, drawing on some of the most recent scholarship inthis area. Next, I delve into the specificities of Lefebvres understanding ofthe relationship between modernity and boredom, and, crucially, what hetakes to be the range of possible responses to the epidemicof mass boredomin our age. Especial reference will be made here to such typicallyLefebvrean concepts as the moment, the aleatory and Marxist irony. Itshould 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, remainsaligned with the spirit and substance of his overarching critical project.The conclusion will present an opportunity to conjecture as to the natureand significance of Lefebvres contribution to the emerging field of whatmight be termed boredom studies.

Boredom and Its DiscontentsLiterary 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. Theseinclude tedium vitae or horror loci (in the Greco-Roman literature), acedia(the noonday demon mentioned in early Christian texts), the melancholiamade famous by Robert Burton, and of course ennui, a condition brieflyfashionable 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 wereevoked by subsequent generations, a strong case can be made for a specifi-cally modern form of boredom that has no direct analogue in earlier typesof subjective malaise. Elizabeth Goodstein articulates this position convinc-ingly in the aforementioned Experience without Qualities: Boredom andModernity. Her main argument is that we should not refer to subjectiveexperiences 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 ofselfhood and affirm their rightful place in the world.

When we mention to friends or colleagues that we are bored, we areunlikely to make reference to an imbalance of the humours, a physiologicalcum cosmological explanation characteristic of the early modern discourseon 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 tediumthat 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 labouringpopulation, by contrast, traditional communal and religious ties functionedto anchor subjects in a world of shared and immanent meaning.Experiences such as melancholia or ennui certainly existed, but they weredistinctly 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 intocommon usage until decades later, and such variants as to bore or boringemerged in the 19th century (1812 and 1864, respectively) (Dalle Pezzeand 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 GermanLangeweile, in spite of Kierkegaards suggestion that boredom is the rootof 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 ofthe dramatic and sentimental nostalgia for happier times typically associ-ated with its antecedents. At least as significantly, boredom is a resolutelymass 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 sweptthrough all social strata, classes and professions indiscriminately. At thistime, 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 committedsuicide because he could not bear the tedium of dressing himself eachmorning.

The historical emergence of boredom is made possible by two develop-ments that followed in the wake of the twin revolutions of industrializationand the French Republic. The first is a process of cultural modernizationthat devalues the past, stressing instead perpetual change, innovation andtransformation vis-a-vis both self and world. The second is an increasinglystandardized form of social existence, which is under continuous assaultfrom the acceleration and redeployment of temporality that is the crux ofmodernization. Formerly heterogeneous activities are subjected to the tyr-anny of a universal clock-time, and individual moments, especially underthe sway of industrial labour, become repetitive, interchangeable and bereftof 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 inhis essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, in the modern city all theusual anchors of personal identity and meaning are swept away in a mael-strom of sensory bombardments and activities. It brought mass anonymityand the blase attitude, new distractions and leisure forms, public squaresand 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 thatthe ties that bound society together, and hitherto provided a meaningfultheodicy, were collapsing. Nineteenth-century Europe was marked by thetriumph of the material over the spiritual, objective over subjective, quanti-tative over qualitative, fuelling a sense of profound dislocation and anomiethat 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 ofreflection. Max Webers disenchantment of the world, in which quotidianelements no longer had a distinct meaning and self-evident relation to thewhole, is made possible by the Enlightenments cultivation of sceptical intel-lectual distance, through which earlier certitudes fail to ring true afterbeing subjected to systematic and unceasing rational investigation.Nihilism is at the heart of modern scientific rationality, because the lattergrasps the world as a collection of inert facts devoid of life or intrinsicmeaning, positing a universe that is profoundly indifferent to human exis-tence.This makes possible an agnosticism with respect to crucial existentialand philosophical questions that is available not only to the writer or aes-thete but also the common people ^ leading ultimately to what Goodsteincalls a democratized skepticism. Such a mass scepticism was steeped in thenew scientific and materialist explanatory framework, which was, perhapsinevitably, applied to boredom as well. This novel rhetoric had no precursorin earlier reflections on acedia or melancholy, bound up as they were innow antiquated religious or metaphysical notions. It held up a resolutelydesacralized vision of the body, an entity animated by abstract naturalforces, impulses and energies. Accordingly, boredom was usually thoughtto 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 supersededboth 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 Marxsaid, and this applied equally to bourgeois platitudes and the suddenly frag-ile epistemological certitudes that science sought to establish. Boredom, inother words, is above all an estrangement from the formerly stable moraland socio-cultural foundations of acting and thinking. But, curiouslyenough, because this modern rhetoric of reflection diagnosed boredom indeterministic 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 distressrelated it to presumptive religious, moral or cultural decline, talk aboutboredom 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 verynature of modern existence itself, at once cause and symptom of the dilem-mas, anxieties and experiences that mark the contemporary age. AsGoodstein succinctly puts it, boredom is a vaguely disquieting mood thathaunts the Western world[,] both as the disaffection with the old thatdrives the search for change and as the malaise produced by living under apermanent speedup (2005: 18).

Modernity, Repetition and Commodity TimeIf it is correct to assume that boredom is experienced as a subjective mal-aise intrinsic to the social forces that constitute modernity, how doesLefebvres understanding of boredom relate to this account? I suggest itfits very well indeed. Much of his understanding of the formation andnature of modern boredom hinges on a transformation in our experience oftime ^ specifically, an epochal transition from cyclical historical time to anabstract, linear form that might be termed commodity time. Life in pre-modern societies, according to Lefebvre, was organized in relation to theendless, 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 aworld 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 rejectsboth cosmological Romanticism and mechanical materialism, Lefebvre isadamant that nature represents a fecundity, a fundamental power that devel-ops cyclically. He gives the example of an ocean wave: although appearinginterchangeable to the casual observer, each is subtly different, shaped ininfinitesimal 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 instancesthey are gentle, at other times immensely threatening, like the unpredict-able rogue wave. In examining waves closely, Lefebvre writes, we begin tonotice that there is always something unexpected, always something whichseems to be a fragment but is suddenly a whole (1995: 129).

Pre-modern societies established contact with these elemental forcesand rhythms through innumerable festivals, rituals and celebrations. Thefestival disrupts the human order of praxis[,] identifying with the rhythmsof the cosmos, as Lefebvre says (1995: 146). This enmeshing of naturalwith embodied human rhythms can be seen most directly in the exercise



of human labour.Work in pre-modern times was understood as both a socialand personal creation, a craft that involved shaping natural materials intandem 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 thanthe rigid application of abstract and invariant principles. Labour unfoldsaccording to intrinsic time-scales, themselves integrated into a broader,coherent style of life marked by custom, habit and ritual. The time of suchnon-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, workand production, rather than from the natural world. The economy becomesthe 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 underthe aegis of the state. Hence, we witness a shift to a purely quantitativetime favouring a formal, decontextualized knowledge, and which is experi-enced as abstract, linear, sequential, predictable and monotonous. The timeof modernity is determined by the logic of the commodity and its endlessflows and homeostatic circuits, of exchange- rather than use-value. It is atime of endless nows, described by Lefebvre as a growing multiplicity ofneutral, 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 thedeterioration of the role formerly played by cyclical repetition in the mainte-nance of social memory. In the predominantly oral culture of pre-moderntimes, societies developed rich symbolic systems that were connected organ-ically to the rhythms and cycles of nature, and, through innumerable ritualsand ceremonies, sustained communal memories over millennia. With thefragmentation of a formerly integrated style of life and the dominance ofexchange-value, communication is increasingly mediated by electronicforms of storage, reproduction, and transmission, which for Lefebvre is thehandmaiden of rational administration, surveillance and technocraticpower. The multifaceted symbol is increasingly replaced by the signal, thelatter of which is born with industrialization (Lefebvre, 2002: 300).Signals reduce the semantic field to a fixed image or idea, and interruptthe continuity of historical experience and collective memorialization. Thiscreates a situation in which, as Bergson also noted, the immediate instanttends to disappear in an instant which has already passed, rather thanembedded organically in the flow of perceptual and experiential duration(Lefebvre, 1995: 166). Signals call for an automatic, essentially passiveresponse; they constitute semiotic mechanisms of compulsion. There is noneed to foster collective memory and historical experience if the signal cancondition individual responses more or less automatically, for the purpose



of undertaking discrete and fragmented instrumental tasks of the sortmodernity 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 hasaccess to nothing of the sort. As such, the loss of experience in moderntimes is more than merely aesthetic: it is social and cultural as well.

Many readers will realize that this account approximates closelyBenjamins discussion of oral culture and tradition in his famous 1936essay The Storyteller. Here, Benjamin suggests that storytelling in pre-modern societies was a communal yet intimate enterprise. The storytellersgoal 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 thisprocess, collective traditions and memories were cultivated and transmittedacross generations. Yet, this did not occur without alteration or change: instorytelling, repetition is crucial for both continuity and transformation,inasmuch as difference emerges out of each iteration. No two tellings arethe 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 andcadences, its shifting moods and affective colourations. To grasp the storyand its allegorical resonances properly, one has to be in an appropriatelyreceptive frame of mind, which can only occur if we are well and trulybored, something that we have insufficient opportunity for in modernurban life. As Benjamin writes, the assimilation of narrative requires astate of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogeeof physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation (1968:91). What is distinctive about modernity is that stories are no longer spunand rewoven continually in communal settings, but are presented as merebits of information and consumed through essentially passive and solitaryacts.To be hookedon the endless streams of information that allegedly con-stitute news, or to focus intently on every fleeting change of fashion, is forBenjamin 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 suggestionthat information deletes thought and reduces positive knowledge to thatwhich is amassed, accumulated, memorized without gaps, outside of livedexperience (2005: 150).

The instant experienced as endless and empty repetition, as boredom,is a Sisyphean punishment characteristic of an unredeemed modernity. Itundermines the assumption that the historical trajectory of modernity isone of boundless improvement and appropriately sunny optimism. Theirony is that the obsession with the new in the modern world functions tomask 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 economicsystem, the human body has to be broken like a draft animal, trained toincorporate 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, heargues, things are created afresh; the dawn of each successive day bringswith 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 andorganic temporal flow, results in lassitude, boredom and fatigue. Linearityalone is amenable to being fully quantified and homogenized . . . [and afully] quantified social time is indifferent to day and night, to the rhythmsof 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 alsomanifestly empty, because bereft of the qualitative meanings and symbolsthat 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 andwoof of everyday life is organized (Lefebvre and Re gulier, 2004: 73). Yet,Lefebvre also argues that there are limits to the technocratic structuring ofthe everyday. Natural rhythms cannot be entirely eliminated, and manyaspects of daily life remain hidden and obscure, beyond the grasp of thefully legible Cartesian space that technocratic rationalism strives to create.The human body, for instance, retains a cryptic opacity, and does notentirely succumb to the power of abstract rational thought, preserving dif-ference within repetition (Lefebvre, 1991b: 203). Similarly, echoes ofancient festival traditions continue to persist in the interstices and marginsof contemporary urban life. Accordingly, cyclical and linear repetitionscoexist 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 andaround 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 formusical production. Accordingly, we need to realize that there are differentmodalities 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 BoredomFor Lefebvre, the banalization of life under modernity is epitomized by thesuburban blandness of the post-war new towns, where city planners andbureaucrats have constructed machines for living that deprive life of allspontaneity, depth and passion. Here, we seem to be poised to enter aworld of unredeemable boredom (Lefebvre, 1995: 119) ^ yet we might alsobe on the brink of something altogether different. The task that lies beforeus, as part of the general revitalization of everyday life, is a restoration ofthe shared experience of lived temporality, wherein emotions, feelings andsubjectivity would be reaffirmed, along with rhythm, body movements,the life of the flesh (Lefebvre, 1995: 263). In contemplating the battle overthe 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 andphilosophical irrationalisms, the aesthetic provocations of the Surrealists,all the way to such moments as the Paris Commune or the near-revolutionof May 1968 in France. Discussing such varied reactions will help us tounderstand why Lefebvre believes that whereas some modalities of boredomcan be understood as a passive resignation to the status quo, or defensiveresponses to the shocks and dislocations of modernity, others might harbourkernels of critical insight and praxis. For, in his inimitably dialectical way,Lefebvre always reminds us that, even in the most apparently trivial ordegraded of human experiences, there reside latently emancipatorypossibilities.

Given the deterioration of creative work under capitalism, and theemergence of a privatized consciousness, it is understandable that manyindividuals seek escape from the monotony and dreariness of daily life inleisure pursuits. Yet, Lefebvre is adamant that leisure cannot be separatedarbitrarily from other spheres of social life, especially work: So we work toearn our leisure, and leisure only has one meaning: to get away from work.A vicious circle (Lefebvre, 1991a: 40). As both Hegel and Marx pointedout, necessity does not disappear in the realm of freedom. Indeed,Lefebvre argues that the commodification of leisure activities is an essentialcomponent of the shift from production to consumption in post-war capital-ism. Modernity creates specific (though debased) needs, that can only besatisfied through the accumulation of commodified objects, images andexperiences. The visions and fantasies projected in advertising offer a meresimulation of non-alienated pleasure and fulfilment, thereby replacing realunhappiness by fictions of happiness (Lefebvre, 1991a: 35). And, ashe notes in the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life, although realphysical drudgery might be largely absent from domestic or other tasksin 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 pursuitsand the accumulation of sensations as an escape from the routinization ofmodern life as early as the 19th century, indulging in detective fiction,travel or collecting, the time of leisure and that of the machine remainseffectively the same. This explains Lefebvres pithy suggestion that to getbored 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 elementof life and experience must have personal value, implying in turn that lifeitself must always be interesting. (It is certainly worth noting that thewords boredom and interesting came into being historically at roughly thesame 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 Lefebvresargument 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 saturationpoint, 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 toLefebvre, consumer activities per se do not allow natural cycles into themix, or cater to genuine creativity and embodied engagement, and hencefail to produce authentically maximal difference (so-called because itretains transformative potential, unlike minimal differences, which aremerely symbolic contrasts that can be easily co-opted by the cultureindustry).

In mechanical repetition, the hallmark of modern labour, all that canbe produced is isolated things or objects with quantifiable exchange-values,but not what Lefebvre calls oeuvres. By the oeuvre, he means the creationof artworks, philosophy or even entire cities, along with their attendantuse-values, through the free (and indeed playful) appropriation of spaceand 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 disclosureof 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 continuouseducation of desire has been replaced by the ever-accelerating yet essen-tially passive accumulation of images and entertainments. In this endlesssearch for novelty and the constant hyper-stimulation that results, we inha-bit an ambient psychological state that is marked by innumerable lightningtransitions 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 identifyas interesting, he says, is a short-lived phenomenon. It is quicklyexhausted. 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 boredomfor Lefebvre, but hardly the only noteworthy one. Although suggestionsthat entire nations are sinking into a boredom at zero point might smackof hyperbole, Lefebvre is arguably correct to say that boredom has nowreached a state of such intimate familiarity that we often fail to recognizethat 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 besaid 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 thatenvelops and benumbs us.This can insulate us from some of the brutalitiesand uncertainties of the modern world, but at the cost of refusing the exis-tential onus of commitment, passion and engagement. Alternatively, wefind ways of accepting the apparently permanent character of boredom, andcope with it accordingly. In a fascinating (if highly compressed) discussion,Lefebvre suggests that what he calls (oddly) Anglo-Saxon humour mightwell be a way to contend with the mundane triviality that typically marksthe 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, aquiet reassurance that things could be worse, a kind of Dunkirk spiritfor the soul, which might be the last refuge of what he calls, disparagingly,po-faced decency (Lefebvre, 1995: 35). Recourse to such humour seeminglyresolves 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 moreprosaically minded Anglophone denizens of the modern world (or so itwould seem, since Lefebvres tongue might be firmly planted in cheekhere), would be to savour boredom ^ or, to be more precise, ennui ^ assomething akin to the leisurely sipping of a fine wine. What Lefebvreterms the French road to ennui implies a quasi-aristocratic cultivation ofworld-weariness and cynical detachment, one imbued with considerable nos-talgia for what Bertolt Brecht once called the bad old days. The person inthe grip of ennui struggles against the [modern] boredom of an absence ofstyle [by] trying to turn the clock back, exhuming old styles, myths andsymbols from a pre-capitalist past. But this sort of response is equally adead-end, inasmuch as it represents the boredom of youth without afuture. [W]ill you be content simply to pick your ironic and philosophicalway through all these boredoms?, Lefebvre asks rhetorically. Or perhapsto invent a new one, just right for the occasion, the exquisite boredom ofthe 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 ofmodernity 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 narcissisticand somewhat juvenile expression of despair. It is worth noting thatLefebvre expressly rejects the idea of Alltglichkeit as espoused byHeidegger and the early Luka cs, inasmuch as they tend to regard the every-day as the natural domain of the anonymous masses, with their middlingthoughts and inconsequential actions, wherein the mundanity of daily lifecan 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 nothingnessof anguish, of vertigo, of fascination (1991a: 125). A good example of thisline 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 elevatedforms 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 finelyobserved phenomenological account of the lived experience of boredom, itremains abstract and overly philosophical, and functions ultimately to rein-scribe the elitist distinction between the mundane boredom of everydayexistence and the deep boredom that leads to metaphysical questions(2005: 283). Although strongly influenced by certain aspects of Heideggersthought (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 exerciseof a transformative praxis imbued with a popular collective will. ForLefebvre, the everyday is not inherently authentic or inauthentic; rather,it is the fundamental terrain on which broader human feelings, pleasuresand intentions are realized and subject to a process of (necessarily incom-plete) authentication. Such attitudes as nostalgia, nihilism or cynicism arefor Lefebvre symptoms of the belief that the everyday is an unalterablegiven, that there are no utopian alternatives to the present organization ofsociety, 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 thesun shines on is always new, how could everyday life [seem] foreverunchangeable, unchangeable in its boredom, its greyness, its repetition ofthe same actions? (Lefebvre, 1991a: 228).

Lefebvre similarly rejects what he calls aestheticism as a solution tothe problem of boredom. Aestheticism, by his reckoning, understands artas a privileged activity detached from the everyday, an attitude whichcannot protect one from boredom, but merely obscure or sublimate it.



Here, Lefebvre is thinking of art as a specialized practice, and the bourgeoisethos of art for arts sake, which for him is a side-effect of fragmentedand alienated labour, and can only provide the illusion of a genuine style oflife. Only in rejecting aestheticism can we fully embrace art as an authenticmodel for living ^ that is, fulfil art by superseding it, and by integrating itinto the fabric of a revivified everyday life (see Lege r, 2006). Beautiful lan-guage, artistic style and aestheticism are merely the end-products of analienation, the alienation of the logos, and the artist has become the highpriest 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 inthe 1920s, Lefebvre eventually concluded that Surrealism cultivated thebizarre and the marvellous as ends in themselves, and hence did not breakdecisively enough from what Benjamin called the phantasmagoria of thecommodity. Surrealisms attack on bourgeois life remained abstract andmystified, and, by restricting itself to the aesthetic plane, represented anersatz bohemianism that offered no real threat to the established order(Lefebvre, 1991a: 123).

All these adaptations and responses to boredom fall short for Lefebvrebecause they do not envisage going beyond the privatized life experiencethat is typical of, though by no means restricted to, the educated middleclasses of theWestern metropole. Yet, even in the most confused and alien-ated consciousness, there are moments of genuine insight. In the realm ofthe modern everyday, the default position might well be that of monotonyand banality. For instance, most conversations, says Lefebvre, are concernedwith such neutral topics as the weather, neighbours or friends. Althoughsuch dialogues are generally uninteresting and repetitive, they do signify adesire to exchange something other than mere things (2002: 313).However, the apparently trivial can shift without warning into topics ofreal interest, replete with deeper significances. Here, speech becomessavage, 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. Atsuch 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 thebanality of self-absorption and the greyness of the everyday, but we typicallylack the resources to carry this desire forward.

The central point here is that, for Lefebvre, daily life is simulta-neously humble and sordidand rich in potential; it is the space-time of vol-untary programmed self-regulation, but also utopian possibility. Despiteall the attacks it is subjected to, the everyday remains the locus of all realcreativity, the alpha and omega of what it means to be human. There is apower 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 toour understanding of the ambiguous textures of everyday life, and that werespond to its admixture of deprivations, boredoms and possibilities in cor-respondingly divergent ways. He suggests a subtle but detectable movementin consciousness from sheer complacency and resignation, through naggingbut still mystified discomforts and questions, to non-adaption, of vaguerejections and unrecognized voids, of hesitations and misunderstandings.In the half-dreams and little everyday miraclesof 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 openpotentially to wider historical and social forces, and hence pregnant withother possibilities. These are threshold moments, and can be likened toBenjamins dream-bird of boredom that hatches the egg of experience(Benjamin, 1968: 91).

The Aleatory and the Utopian MomentThis complex mixture of ambiguity, obfuscation and insight that marks oureveryday 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 townmentioned earlier, Lefebvre contrasts the noisy but dull repetitiveness ofmodern 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 earliertimes there existed a different kind of boredom, one that might shade intoexperiences of genuine leisure or idleness (see Barthes, 1985). This olderform 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 isjust boring, the pure essence of boredom. (1995: 118)

In The Storyteller, as mentioned, Benjamin argues that narrativescan neither be told nor assimilated properly through relaxed and ancestralrepetition if we are not in the appropriate state of mental relaxation, of asort the boredom found typically in pre-capitalist societies made possible.This is starkly opposed to the manic, enervated boredom of the modernworld, 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 impotentfrustration, anger and impatience (see Schweitzer, 2008). As Benjaminreminds us, we are bored in a good way when we are waiting, but we dontknow precisely what for, a mode of interruption that changes the verynature of temporal experience itself. Rather than strive to kill time, weshould invite it in, convert it into charged expectation of a sort that canreveal genuinely new horizons and challenges, where the future reachesinto the present, touches it, and saturates it with otherness. Hence, a certainkind of boredom is important for both Benjamin and Lefebvre, because itrepresents what the former calls (in The Arcades Project) a Trojan horse,by which a gradual mode of awakening can stealthily enter our commodifieddreamworld 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 humanpropensities for passionate engagement, play and the ludic (such as in thefestival), the pleasurable and the aesthetic. To illustrate this, he draws onan argument made by information theorists that the production of newmeaning is balanced between sheer repetition and chaotic randomness.What Lefebvre calls the pleonasm ^ the pointless repetition of signs thatis easily understood, but which generates no new insight ^ is clearly onegateway to boredom for him. But a situation that presents a set of possibili-ties that are so completely open and unstructured as to render unfathomablethe link to concrete praxis tends to induce a fatalistic, debilitating melan-choly which is, in effect, another type of boredom. Between these twoextremes 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 passagefrom the 18th Brumaire, which supposes that human action is neitherrooted in absolute contingency, disconnected from socio-historical factors,nor rigidly and blindly determined. Rather, it represents a dialectical unitylinking necessity and chance, where chance expresses a necessity and neces-sity expresses itself via a network of chances (Lefebvre, 1995: 203). Just asthere is no hidden hand of the marketplace (and goodness knows what theother hand is up to), for Lefebvre there is no Hegelian cunning of history.A knowledge of the aleatory prevents overcaution and hesitation, and hencecan enhance transformative potentialities, but also alerts us to dangers ofhubris and the ever-present possibility of failure. Hence, boredom andindifference can only be avoided if we see the present as laden with real pos-sibilities for different ways of living, but not wholly unrealistic aspirationsthat can never be achieved. As Lefebvre writes: Between the world whichis chock-a-block full of realism and positivism, and the gaping world ofpure negativity and nihilism, our aim is to discover the open world, theworld of what is possible (2002: 263).

There is, for Lefebvre, no sudden and definitive leap from the realmof necessity into freedom, nor any possibility of complete dis-alienation.



Nonetheless, there are times when tangible prospects for thorough-goingsocial transformation hove vividly into view.This is what Lefebvre calls themoment, a flash of insight into the range of historical possibilities thatare embedded in the totality of being, but that cannot be disentangledfrom the activities of everyday life. These are manifestations of what couldbe termed everyday utopianism (see Gardiner, 1995, 2004). The momentgenerates a tragic consciousness because most of these potentials willremain tantalizingly unfulfilled or only partially realized, although suchfailures are never complete or for all time. The theory of moments,Lefebvre writes, may permit us to illuminate the slow stages by whichneed becomes desire, deep below everyday life, and on its surface. [Theymay] resolve the age-old conflict between the everyday and tragedy, andbetween triviality and Festival (2002: 358).

For all his ambivalence regarding modernity, Lefebvre acknowledgesthat the idea of somehow returning to the pre-modern communities of thepast can only lead to the cul-de-sac of reactionary, even fascist politics.Although he has often been accused of romanticizing pre-modern forms ofsocial life, and of viewing the contemporary everyday as irredeemably shal-low and corrupted, a careful reading of the widest possible range of histexts reveals a much more nuanced and defensible position (see Gardiner,2004). Lefebvre occasionally evinces a certain nostalgia for pre-capitalistcommunities, and their richly complex and fully integrated styles of life.Yet, he is equally cognizant that, although we can learn from the past andstrive 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 mightbe 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 muchRomanticism, with its mix of fatalism, ennui and quixotic desire to restorean irretrievably bygone state of affairs. We may well continue to have our(legitimately) wistful regrets and longings with respect to the world wehave lost, but Lefebvre believes ultimately that what is needed today is anew or revolutionary Romanticism, one that is oriented expressly towardsthe future (see Lwy and Sayre, 2001: 221^5).

The key, then, is to grasp and nurture the transformative possibilitiesthat inhere in modernity, but without succumbing to a naive progressivism.For Lefebvre, such a project entails the cultivation of a profound sense ofirony, 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 educatedand leisured classes; we live, as Goodstein reminds us, in an era of mass ordemocratized scepticism. Maieutic, the technique of Socratic doubt andquestioning, 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 ofrisk 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 inthe modern world, of their multiplicity, of the necessity of opting and therisk every option involves (Lefebvre, 1995: 3). As such, it is linked stronglyto the aleatory. It is an ironical consciousness that allows us to prise openthe gap between appearance and reality, expectation and outcome, and ishence 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 themodern era, but because it never leaves the hermeticism of a self-referentialsubjectivity Romanticism eschews an understanding of the underlyingsocio-economic transformations that are necessary to correct the realsources of subjective malaise (Lefebvre, 1995: 18). As such, Romanticismis vulnerable to pathological forms of obsessive introspection, of which bore-dom is one symptom, and that can easily lead to the sort of existentialdread and anxiety that Sartre and others philosophized about. Benjamin,incidentally, came to the same conclusion: Romanticism ends in a theoryof boredom, the characteristically modern sentiment (1999b: 110). ForLefebvre, however, the perpetuum mobile of such an insular subjectivityis 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 theabsolute 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 specificobjects and aims with respect to either action or knowledge, but remainscognizant of the arcane and sometimes mysterious movement of thedialectic.

The alternative to what Lefebvre refers to as the boredomof dogmaticMarxism is, therefore, a critical (and self-critical) Marxist thought thatcleaves neither to an unmoored Romantic subjectivism or the brutal neces-sitarianism of Hegelian logic and other determinisms. Official Marxismswere fatally compromised because they were incapable of grasping the ines-capably tragic dimension of human life, and the perennial gap between isand ought, such as the Stalinist predilection for a new Communist man ofrobust good cheer, oodles of decency and deadpan earnestness. ForLefebvre, what is just as lamentable as the cynical cafe existentialist is thegood person, whether bourgeois or worker, who harbours no trace of subjec-tive depth or ironical awareness. The festival of the decent fellow hasbecome a meaningless profession of faith in a relentlessly facile optimismand stick-to-itiveness, a watchword for banality and boredom, of which thecurrent glut of self-help books and aspirations to blissful if effortless andcost-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 ofgive, of play and openness, but also shuns the cult of pure spontaneism.



It makes judgements and choices, but equally respects the aleatory, andknows that failure is always a possible outcome; it affirms the ineluctablytragic 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 onirony as a form of subjectivistic idealism. To sidestep this, he distinguishesbetween idealist versus concrete forms of utopianism, the latter of whichis 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 arebrought into being, has an undeniably utopian resonance. As he says, themaieutic of modernity is not without a certain utopianism (1995: 45, italicsin 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 toembrace utopianism, understood as a mode of imagining that desires andperpetually 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 ofutopia, which is a form of conceptual and methodological closure that canbe positively dangerous, when it is not merely facile or obsolete (seeJacoby, 2005). In Lefebvres new utopianism, the imagination is becominga lived experience, something experimental; instead of combating or repress-ing rationality, it is incorporating it. Only a kind of reasoned but dialecticaluse of utopianism will permit us to illuminate the present in the name ofthe future (Lefebvre, 1995: 357).

ConclusionIf lively discussions with my students over the past several years are anyindication, perhaps an effective way to dispel boredom is simply to talkabout it ^ even in academic settings that, as Amir Baghdadchi (2005) hasobserved, are capable of generating a unique form of boredom. (Doubtless,every professor secretly fears the appearance of the dreaded word boringon anonymous student evaluations.) In The Philosophy of Boredom, LarsSvendson notes similarly that although his pupils are often perplexed whenit comes to comprehending such previously well-known philosophical ideasas anxiety, judging them to be remote and arcane concerns, students todayrecognize instantly the experience of boredom, which exercises a peculiarfascination for them. According to Svendson, this is indicative of a profoundsocio-cultural shift in Western societies, wherein boredom has become ouraffectual base-line, a kind of default setting of mood that is so familiar tous ^ again, the cosy embrace of Benjamins warm, grey cloth ^ that weneed to be jolted out of a routinized state of boredom to be able to recognizeit as such. Because in modernity there is no substantial distinction between



the significant and the insignificant, writes Svendsen, everything becomesequally interesting and as a result equally boring (2005: 61).

That this topic is widely considered to be anything but boring mightalso be evinced in a rapidly growing body of scholarly literature, a goodexample being the recent collection Essays on Boredom and Modernity,edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani (2008). My sense is thatalthough Lefebvres ideas on this score can be seen to dovetail thematically,and to a certain extent methodologically with many aspects of this emergingsub-field of boredom studies, in other respects he remains an unsettlingand perhaps unrecuperable presence. In the concluding remarks thatfollow, I propose to explore why this is arguably the case, through a briefconsideration of Harvie Fergusons 2009 book Self-Identity and EverydayLife, which contains a discussion of boredom. It is hoped that this exercisewill clarify the nature and potential of Lefebvres contribution to the currentdebate over this issue.

Fergusons analysis in Self-Identity and Everyday Life grows out of hisearlier study of Kierkegaards critique of modernity, the latter touching onboredom only in passing, focusing instead on the related (but not identical)phenomenon of melancholia (Ferguson, 1995). Although part of RoutledgesThe New Sociology series, each title of which contains the phrase everydaylife, Fergusons more recent book is distinctive because he does not treatthe everyday as an unproblematic backdrop against which theoretical discus-sions of the body or globalization are foregrounded. Rather, his explicitgoal is to treat the everyday critically and as a substantive topic in its ownright, to tease out its genealogies, mutations and correlative effects in thecontext of late modernity. Yet, although the everyday has lately come tobe established as a key concept vis-a-vis our understanding of the socialworld, Fergusons central argument is that it cannot be grasped as a clearlyidentifiable set of practices, attitudinal dispositions or forms of conscious-ness. This is because everyday life is something of an anti-concept: it is anill-defined region of raw, fragmentary and essentially unmediated experi-ence into which all concepts dissolve (Ferguson, 2009: 34). Such an inchoateand non-identical domain can only be approached apophatically, a stancereminiscent 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 theunbounded, obscure and mundane background from which identities ariseand 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 formerlystable linkages between selfhood, identity and the everyday are becomingincreasingly fractured ^ indeed, they are now at best seen as unrelated, oreven antagonistic, processes (2009: 8). The notion that society constitutesthe site where all the myriad particularities of daily life are sutured togetherto 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 thissense, become the proverbial emperor with no clothes (see also Bauman,2005: 374). Since there is no overarching cohesiveness vis-a-vis social lifetoday, the synthetic unity of the subjects experience unravels. The so-called postmodern turn merely reflects a heightened awareness of suchperpetual flux and dislocation. This insight leads Ferguson to a relativelysustained consideration of boredom, which, pace Goodstein et al., heviews as an archetypally modern experience ^ it is, as Benjamin alsonoted, the everyday made manifest. In such a world, daily life becomesa here and now of banal and mundane activities (shopping, commutingand so forth) which, although occasionally punctuated by more unusualor unexpected events, is marked above all by a succession of hazy andlargely 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 thatin the general indifference of boredom, we find what is perhaps the lastrealm of inclusive experience left to us, a null point of radical equalitythat, 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 ofboredom constitutes something of a blank slate from which new move-ments and surpassings can spring forth, opening up a hitherto obscuredwonderland of ontological playfulness. Yet, from within the parametersof his account, it is difficult to envisage such a possibility. Part of thereason for this is that such moods as boredom are, for Ferguson, floating,decontextualized, and indefinite states of being (2009: 168), and arehence wholly detached from material or socio-historical conditions. In thethird volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre appears to makea similar point when he states that conventional social science cannoteasily comprehend or analyse boredom, because the latter is an ambiguousand shifting affective state that does not conform easily to the receivednotion of social facts ^ which, ironically, has not stopped legions of psy-chologists, criminologists and sociologists from trying to quantify andmeasure boredom (see Klapp, 1986). Despite its seemingly nebulousand changeable quality, however, what is valuable about Lefebvresapproach to boredom is that he does not confine the experience of bore-dom to the phenomenological level. Although it might seem to be awholly ineffable and hence incommunicable experience, boredom forLefebvre is symptomatic of deeper social currents that can be uncoveredand 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, alongsidesuch 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 acertain 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 pollingdata, linearly repetitive tasks, universal application of positive knowl-edge, domination of the abstract through generalized exchange and soon), as well as the creation of innumerable stratifications and hierarchieswith 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 therealization of genuine forms of sociability marked by unity in difference,the enhancement of individual and collective agency, and the enrichmentof radical democracy, although these can only occur through dialecticaloppositions 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 widearray 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 turnspalliative, accommodating or frustrated, evincing only a partial and mysti-fied understanding of how the economic system induces the homogenizationand quantification of space and time, developments about which Fergusonhas very little to say. In seeking to prise open the crack for freedom to slipthrough, Lefebvre argues that we need to analyse boredom by recourse toa critical dialectical method (1995: 124). This is hardly straightforward: hisambivalence about boredom manifests itself in a wide range of intellectualresponses to it across a number of different texts. But his writings doconvey the possibility of a successful working through of boredom, so asto arrive at higher states of awareness and a better understanding of thelink to a potentially transformative praxis, which would require a more pro-ficient grasp of the aleatory, as filtered through a healthy dose of Marxistirony. This avenue might prove to be a more tangible and effective prophy-lactic against modern forms of boredom than Fergusons call for ontologicalplayfulness ^ or at least a rejigging of boredoms default position, ifhardly an outright cure, as if such a thing were possible. Lefebvre isenough of a Marxist, albeit a distinctly heretical one, to suppose that manyhuman problems are not eternal aspects of the human condition, but histor-ically contingent ones that have their (at least partial) solution in practicerather than endless philosophical hand-wringing, or the pervasive distrac-tions of aestheticism, consumption or mysticism. This stance seems to beat the heart of his concrete utopianism. And perhaps it is here that wemight witness a renewed emphasis on the pleasures and desires of thebody, 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 orMay 68. Ultimately, for Lefebvre, it is a matter of:

a slow but profound modification of the everyday ^ of a new usage of thebody, of time and space, of sociability; something that implies a social andpolitical 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 forsociety 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 thatstimulate 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 ofWestern 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 HumanSciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with Michael M. Bell), TheDialogics of Critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology(Routledge, 1992), and a special double issue of the journal CulturalStudies, with the title Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing TurnedItself 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 worksinclude Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Peter Lang,2012). [email: [email protected]]



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