Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (review)

Abstract

ion of categories of language and their reifi cation into things. Although Goodstein does not use the term, this fallacy could be called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” (This is a phrase that Alfred North Whitehead coined in connection with his critique of scientifi c materialism. Its use suggests the affi nities between his critique and Goodstein’s account of the modern rhetoric of refl ection.) In the case of Kuhn, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the historically and culturally specifi c language of boredom that Kuhn and his audience share and its reifi cation as an ahistorical principle that grounds Kuhn’s idealist language on boredom. In the case of Lepenies, this fallacy takes the form of an abstraction drawn from the language of boredom and reifi ed as the social practices that ground Lepenies’s language on boredom. Neither Kuhn’s idealist history nor Lepenies’s materialist sociology recognize the historicity of the modern discourse on boredom. Goodstein faults Kuhn and Lepenies for their failure to think through the relationship between the language of boredom and the language on boredom. The conditions that make this failure possible are addressed in Chapter 3, “Boredom and the Modernization of Subjectivity.” This chapter describes the spread of Enlightenment skepticism in an environment of rapid political and economic change. Beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century and continuing to the middle of the nineteenth, a discursive paradigm shift occurs. The result is a rhetoric of refl ection organized around a radically isolated subjectivity and a “clocktime” view of temporality, time as a series of empty, meaningless moments stretching forward in linear progression. This rhetoric of refl ection maintains a tension between idealist and materialist accounts of experience within a materialist framework that medicalizes subjectivity. Goodstein’s genealogy of the modern discourse on boredom is strongly reminiscent of Foucault’s genealogy of modernity. However, she distinguishes her discourse analysis from Foucault’s, arguing in effect that Foucault is guilty of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The key to her argument is Anson Rabinbach’s claim about the rise in the nineteenth century of “transcendental materialism,” a materialist idealism that, as capitalist industrial ideology and utopian inspiration, structures modern subjectivity. According to Goodstein, Foucault’s “microphysics of power” is, by virtue of its Nietzschean inheritance, grounded in the same transcendental materialism as the modernity it analyzes. It operates as a kind of materialist idealism, rendering invisible the historical particularity it shares with modernity. One of the consequences of this is that Foucault’s analysis is unable to account for its own critical power.