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Work and play in a culture of boredom
Benjamin Myers
The cultural critic Neil Postman has famously remarked that we are
‘amusing ourselves to death.’ Our every waking moment is filled with
pleasure and entertainment, and yet, paradoxically, our lives are
coloured by a strange malaise, by the dull weariness of boredom. Never
have we been more entertained; never have we been more bored.
What might Christians have to say about this strange phenomenon of
cultural boredom? On the whole, Christian theologians have harboured
dark thoughts about boredom, and have tended to regard it as a sin. In
the nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren
Kierkegaard remarked that ‘boredom is the root of all evil,’ and in
the twentieth century, the French theologian Jacques Ellul identified
boredom – so ‘gloomy, dull, and joyless’ – as a defining perversion of
modern social life. Ellul’s view here was close to that of the
Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who similarly described ‘the
signature of modern man’ as neither serenity nor rebellion, but simply
an ‘utter weariness and boredom.’ In Barth’s view, ‘man is bored with
himself,’ and as a result ‘everything has become a burden to him.’
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Karl Barth described ‘the signature of modern man’ as … ‘utter weariness and boredom.’
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But perhaps we can find a more constructive way to reflect on this
peculiar – and peculiarly modern – state of mind. It seems to me that
the Italian philosopher Giorgo Agamben has pointed the way forwards
here. Human beings, he says, ‘cannot be defined by any proper
operation,’ and so our humanness can never be exhausted by any
particular task or identity; we thus have a ‘creative semi-indifference
to any task.’ Agamben points to an essential theological truth about
human beings: we are not reducible to our work; we always exceed any
given task. Or as Agamben puts it elsewhere, boredom discloses the
essence of a ‘simply living being.’ Between our work and our being
there lies a gap – and boredom names this gap.
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we are not reducible to our work; we always exceed any given task.
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This theme of a gap between being and work has never been more beautifully articulated than in Andrew Marvell’s 1653 poem, ‘Bermudas.’ The poem depicts an unfallen Paradise, and it ends with the lines:
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Thus sang they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
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The image here of prelapsarian labour is simple, but astonishingly powerful. They are not singing to keep time in their rowing – they are rowing to keep time in their song! They are really working, but they exceed their work, and the labour itself is simply a needless embellishment, a fitting but absolutely non-necessary improvisation of their existence. Or to put it more simply, their work is pure praise: the rowing of the oars simply forms the background rhythm of their song. In Agamben’s terminology, the rower in this poem could be described as a ‘being-without-work’ – he really works, but his work is superfluous, since he utterly exceeds it.
But if Agamben rightly insists that human beings are irreducible to
their work, he fails to note the (today more important) point that
humans also exceed their leisure and enjoyment. If boredom names the
gap between our being and our work, it also names the gap between being
and enjoyment. At least in the affluent West, most of us would accept
that life cannot finally be boiled down to work; the more sinister and
more beguiling threat today is the reduction of life to enjoyment.
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more sinister ... is the reduction of life to enjoyment.
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As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has frequently observed,
late-capitalist existence is structured by an obscene and threatening
superego imperative: Enjoy! In its own way, this capitalist law of
enjoyment also seeks to close the gap between our being and our works,
except that here, our true and proper ‘work’ – the work which the law
demands of us – is enjoyment itself. The true horror of the Wachowski
brothers’ great film The Matrix (1999) of course lies precisely here:
when Neo swallows the red pill, he discovers that all human existence
has been secretly transformed into a monstrous technological production
of enjoyment; it is ‘pure,’ immediate experience, no longer mediated
even by life – or rather, it is human enjoyment at the expense of
humanity itself.
In our late capitalist setting, under the law of enjoyment, the only absolute prohibition is the indifference of boredom – or rather, the ideology of consumerism generates boredom precisely in order to forbid it and alleviate it. The machinery of late capitalism thus functions like the strange poison mentioned by Hegel: it is a medicine which paradoxically ‘gives the wound and heals it.’ We are always bored, and we are always (forcibly) being rescued from our boredom. As Aldous Huxley predicted in his great novel Brave New World (1932), our society has thus become one in which there is ‘no leisure from pleasure.’
So just as a society which reduces life to social utility will prohibit
boredom vis-à-vis work, in the same way a society which reduces life to
enjoyment will prohibit boredom vis-à-vis leisure. But if, at times, a
truly radical resistance must take the form of passive
non-participation, is it possible that boredom itself might today be a
significant site of resistance? As human beings, we are always in
excess: we exceed our tasks and our enjoyment alike. There is always a
gap between my ‘works’ – what I do, what I enjoy, which market niche I
identify with – and my humanity. To be bored – without immediately
seeking to transform that boredom into either productivity on the one
hand or enjoyment on the other – is to hold open this gap, and to
resist participating in its insidious closure.
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The human being under grace – is the one whose work and play can never be taken too seriously
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To face both work and enjoyment with what Agamben calls a ‘creative semi-indifference’ is, today, the gesture of the human being who stands before God and is recognised by God – the human being who is no longer under law (neither the law of works nor the law of enjoyment), but under grace.
This human being – the human being under grace – is the one whose work and play can never be taken too seriously, since they are merely creative embellishments, superfluous improvisations, which contribute to the harmony and peace of a life of praise. Like Marvell’s rowers, both our work and our play can thus find their true meaning only as they serve the modest role of ‘keeping the time’ in our song:
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And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
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Benjamin Myers is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for the History of European Discourses. He is the author of Milton’s Theology of Freedom (2006) and of many essays on the history of Christian theology.
