Affect and critique: A politics of boredom*

Ben Anderson

doi:10.1177/02637758211002998

Abstract

What are the politics of boredom? And how should we relate to boredom? In this paper, I explore these questions through cases where the disaffection and restlessness of boredom have become a matter of concern in the UK and USA at the junctures between Fordism and neoliberalism, and amid today’s resurgence of right-wing populism. I argue that what repeats across the critique of the ‘ordinary ordinariness’ of Fordism, the neoliberal counterrevolution and today’s right-wing populism is a ‘promise of intensity’ – the promise that life will feel eventful and boredom will be absent. As I make this argument, I reflect on the role of critique in the context of the multiplication of modes of inquiry that has accompanied the interest in affect across the humanities and social sciences. Rejecting the dismissal of critique in some affect-related work, I advocate for and exemplify a type of ‘diagnostic critique’ based on the practice of conjunctural analysis as pioneered by Stuart Hall and colleagues.

Highlights

Boredom is strange, or perhaps our relations to it are
If we slow down and pay attention, we find that claims about boredom as collective condition or bored subjects surface in the background to many recent attempts to diagnose the affective character of the present: cycles of online outrage interrupt the almost but not quite boredom of the scroll; boredom settles in peripheral places supposedly left behind by a rapacious global capital; it exists as a felt consequence of austerity in places where youth services have contracted; it can be a symptom of burnout, etc
Whilst the exact critique is rarely articulated, across the punks, second-wave feminism and so on a claim was made that boredom is symptomatic of something lost in relation to unspecified virtues that go by names like dignity, spontaneity, fulfilment or freedom. To put it in Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) terms, enrolled as part of the ‘artistic’ critique of Fordism from the 1960s: invoked as symptomatic of a crisis of meaning and purpose and of intensity. In this critique of Fordism, we find an update of how boredom has long figured in criticisms of capitalist modernity more broadly – where the disaffection of boredom is part of a story of modern alienation and becomes a secondary effect of a series of familiar, nameable, causes: rationalisation, secularisation, individualisation, etc

Summary

Introduction

Perhaps our relations to it are. It is frequently invoked by states, the media, social movements and individuals as a cause for a heterogeneous list of actions coded as excessive and anti-social: ’offending behaviour’ or ’deviant behaviour’ The vision is one of disaffected subjects detaching from work or leisure or family and desiring ‘more’ to life than mid-century Fordism can offer This led to wider claims of the importance of boredom by cultural critics trying to understand a period of intense change. Critique is focused on the repetitive time and experience of work/leisure and, perhaps more interestingly, on boredom as symptom of an emerging crisis in the ‘promissory legitimacy’ (Beckert, 2020) of Fordism organised around the family wage and compensatory leisure Even if they shared little else, punks in the UK, American factory workers and White middle- and upper-class housewives in the USA perhaps shared a desire for ‘more’. Instead of the ‘crisis ordinariness’ (Berlant, 2011) of the post-Fordist present, what was critiqued was ‘ordinary ordinariness’: repetitive, inert, empty time where nothing new happened

Section 2: Diagnostic critique and the ‘affective present’

Section 3: Populist boredoms

Concluding Comments