The Interface is not restricted to any given program, app, or platform. It is, rather, the very idea of how we interact with the world in every sense. With this in mind, philosopher and writer Mark Kingwell explores the nature of boredom, identifying differences between its neoliberal and philosophical manifestations—a topic he’ll take up during his Mack Lecture on April 17.
When I first started thinking and writing seriously about boredom, the obvious joke occurred to me: How can one do this in a way that is not itself boring? But of course the answer is easy. Boredom is not boring! Philosophers and artists have long been preoccupied with the subject and have produced, as a result, some of the key works of the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries.
The timeframe is not coincidental. Until there existed the material conditions allowing for bourgeois leisure time, unrelated to the pressing material needs of life, boredom could hardly arise for most people as an issue, let alone a philosophical one. If I spend most of every day just working to secure the needs for tomorrow, I have little, if any, time in which to feel bored. Boredom is, in this sense, a luxury good: something enjoyed only by the very rich and then, eventually, by the democratized class of people who enjoy freedom from direct need. I always think the German noun Freizeit captures both the promise and the threat of time not ruled by specific tasks: time open to freedom but also to the abyss of uselessness.
It may be no surprise, then, that the most acute philosophers of boredom have emerged from the European tradition of reflecting on life’s special challenges
In fact, a good deal of this reflection goes back, in the Western tradition, to Aristotle’s ideas about time and the infinite. In the twentieth century, cranky Theodor Adorno would vilify camping and sun bathing as boring and stupid uses of non-productive time. But could we ever imagine living up to Aristotle’s notion that genuine leisure involves contemplation of the divine within us, rather than the relentless and semi-panicked version of spending the weekend that dominates so many? The moments set off from labor are not supposed to be another form of labor! Nor, indeed, are they supposed to invite experiences of restlessness and dissatisfaction, which connote boredom in its most pernicious forms now.
A lot has been written about boredom since these canonical thinkers had their way with the topic. I’m not sure we advance far beyond their analyses lately, except with specific reference to the technology—and that is the subject of my new book. I offer a fairly elaborate typology of boredom there, set out in the first couple of chapters, but the essential distinction is between what I call philosophical boredom and neoliberal boredom. This distinction is the crux of the book.
Philosophical boredom is, in brief, the kind that Heidegger discusses. When I reflect on the experience of boredom, what do I discover? Well, if I am
The problem is that neoliberal boredom lies in wait. This is the form or experience of boredom that sees only threat and bad forms of despair. Thus the various ingenious mechanisms by which we seek to evade it—what I mean by the blanket idea of the Interface. The Interface is not restricted to any given program, app, or platform. It is, rather, the very idea of how we interact with the world in every sense. A highway presents an interface; so does a keyboard. Likewise a phone app, yes, but also a subway platform. We flee from ourselves the more we use such interfaces to suppress or evade the boredom, which might enlighten us.
Try as you might, you cannot swipe or scroll away from the human condition. So then what? Well, as usual from a philosopher, the answer is more critical reflection. Are you bored with your feeds, scrolls, pins, and posts? Think hard about what that means, and what you might be inclined—or not!—to do about it!
Meanwhile, is there boring art? Of course there is. Generating boredom is one of the things that art does. The question before us then concerns whether the boredom so induced was deliberate or the result of aesthetic failure. It makes a difference—a topic that will provide the focus for my April lecture at the Walker Art Center. I trust it will not be boring.
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