Abstract
In this paper, I consider what it might mean to approach boredom as a problem of post-history, rather than of modernity as such. Post-history, or ‘end of history’, in this sense, is linked with the impossibility or unlikelihood of political-systemic change, and thus with the disappearance of the contingency or temporal flux that had been understood as the context or prerequisite of political action and political freedom. I will, argue, firstly, that both Rousseau and Fukuyama depict societies that are ‘post-historical’, in this sense, and which are marked by ‘boredom’ of this specifically post-historical kind. Secondly, I will argue that both thinkers link post-historical boredom with the disappearance or diminution of the ‘drive for recognition’ that both understood as both an agent and effect of ‘history’. Thirdly, I will argue that while Fukuyama understands post-historical boredom as an ‘irritant’ that threatens to restart history without quite succeeding in doing so, Rousseau understands it as an essentially stabilising (and happy) condition that maintains post-historical man in an equilibrium modelled on the order of nature itself. And fourthly, I consider certain ways in which this ‘post-historical’ boredom might coexist and overlap with the ‘promise of intensity’ experienced in post-Fordist neoliberal society.
Introduction
Contemporary crises of liberal capitalism have frequently been discussed in relation to emotions of anger or resentment – particularly post-2016 – but less commonly in relation to boredom. 1 As Anderson puts it, ‘Boredom does not seem to quite fit with these strong stories about the role of heightened passions in a turbulent present’. 2 And while boredom has been extensively analysed as a social and cultural phenomenon of industrial late modernity, it has not been given much consideration as a distinct problem of political theory, specifically. In this paper, I approach boredom specifically as a problem of post-history, in the belief that this approach makes this political link. Referring primarily to Rousseau and Fukuyama – who, I argue, are both theorists of post-history – I will suggest that boredom can be understood, on the one hand, as both a consequence of, and as an irritant within post-history, as a potentially destabilising force that threatens to ‘restart’ history, but does not succeed in doing so. This, post-historical boredom, I will argue, can be understood in a specifically political sense, because it relates to the impossibility of further systemic-political change at the ‘end of history’ – that is, to the disappearance of the political flux, whether cyclical or directional, that itself defined ‘history’. On the other hand, I will argue that boredom, or its absence, can be related specifically to certain ways in which time and temporality are formatted in post-history itself. Thus, I hope to contribute to an understanding of ways in which ‘claims about boredom as collective condition … surface in the background to many recent attempts to diagnose the affective character of the present’. 3
Boredom in Fukuyama’s post-history
Boredom arises in Fukuyama’s infamous ‘end of history’ not because nothing of note happens, but rather because the ‘mechanism of desire’ 4 – the desire for recognition, specifically, that had previously sustained a progressive directional history – has been expended through the supposed realisation of equal recognition under liberal democracy. In Fukuyama’s dialectical account that postulates ‘a common evolutionary path for all human societies’, 5 liberal democracy is the ‘end’ of history because it has satisfied the two ‘mechanisms’ of historical change, providing both material prosperity and equalised recognition. It represents the end point of a ‘universal’ historical process that, in Hegelian terms, has culminated ‘in the realisation of freedom in concrete political and social institutions’ 6 – with the desire to be recognized, in particular, being ‘critical to political life’ and driving ‘the whole historical process’. 7 As Fukuyama puts is, ‘the universal and homogenous states that appears at the end of history can thus be seen as resting on the twin pillars of economics and recognition. The human historical process that leads up to it has been driven forward equally by the progressive unfolding of modern natural science, and by the struggle for recognition’. 8
Previous social-political systems collapsed and were replaced by superior ones under the contradictions caused by the progression of these directional ‘mechanisms’, but the historical finality of liberal democracy, for Fukuyama, lies in the claim that it will not encounter tensions or contradictions that cannot be resolved from within itself, of the kind that lead it to ‘collapse under its own weight’. 9 Thus, while significant political events and changes may occur, ‘we cannot picture for ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one’; 10 liberal democracy represents an historical finality because it is ‘free of contradiction’, or at least of contradictions of the sort or scale that threaten its replacement or collapse. 11
Therefore, historical finality, for Fukuyama, does not necessarily mean perfect tranquillity or stability: rather, it simply requires that any instability or discord that does arise must not reach such a level that leads to liberal democracy being supplanted by an alternative social-political order. Indeed this more minimalist version of his argument, has, arguably not been discredited as thoroughly as is often assumed. In turn, while Fukuyama undoubtedly overstated the stability of crisis-prone capitalist democracies, he acknowledged that there would remain certain forms of discord, malcontent, even instability, in the historical finality that liberal democracy represents. And crucially, one of the affects or emotions that may trouble or irritate liberal democracy, in Fukuyama’s account, is something tantamount to boredom.
Boredom, for Fukuyama, arises in a social state where something akin to ‘equal recognition’ has been realised, but where accordingly, the historical drive for thymos – for glory, recognition, self-disclosure and so on – has dissipated or has been exhausted. Thus, as he puts it, ‘the post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one’s life in a battle for prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination’. 12 And where men no longer pursue glory, but rather the petty pleasures of life – ‘the myriad small needs of the body’, 13 along with piecemeal mundane forms of private recognition, this potentially results in a kind of boredom. Evoking Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ who is devoted to comfort rather than glory, Fukuyama curiously anticipates Mark Fisher’s 2014 account of ‘cultural time folding in on itself’, speculating there would be ‘no new eras and no particular distinction of the human spirit for artists to portray’ 14 – a staid and sclerotic social world. Thus ‘in the post-historical period,’ Fukuyama suggests – in the 1989 essay presaging his famous book – ‘there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.’ 15 Boredom, in this perspective, arises essentially from the disappearance of the drive for glory and for superior recognition that had, supposedly, marked and driven ‘history’ – as man no longer strives for ‘great’ things, and resorts to petty pursuits in a society predicated on equalised recognition.
In his 1989 essay, Fukuyama suggests in passing: ‘Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again’ 16 – in other words, that boredom is sufficiently important to potentially destabilise the putative ‘end of history’. In his later book, he describes post-historical men, inhabiting a political world predicated on equal recognition, becoming restless in this tranquil egalitarian state, and pursuing residual forms of ‘superior’ recognition in activities such as sport. However, while Fukuyama frames this boredom as a kind of irritant that threatens to ‘restart’ history, crucially it will not, he believes, quite succeed in doing so. Thus, boredom leads to a kind of state of bubbling discord, a social irritant which mimics, but does not in fact quite achieve the ‘restarting’ of history, because of liberal democracy’s supposed historical finality. It appears, then, to be a permanent state of low-level discontent, one which fizzles, but without direction or historical force. Boredom, in this sense, is the engine-spluttering of post-history. It expresses a relative or partial discontent but it is contained, albeit while bubbling or fizzling, in the post-historical order. Despite his earlier musings about boredom ‘restarting history,’ Fukuyama concludes in his book that liberal democracy provides sufficiency outlets for thymos, in an equalised form, but while balancing it in a stable way against the forces of reason and desire.
Boredom in Rousseau’s post-history
Less obviously, Rousseau is also a theorist of post-history. On the one hand, his concept of historical time is linear and ‘quasi-teleological.’ 17 He outlines a secularised account of man’s historical ‘fall’ and projects his redemption in politics – through the restoration, in political society, of his natural freedom and happiness. On the other hand, the republican societies that Rousseau depicts are arguably post-historical’ in a way that is not all that dissimilar to Fukuyama depiction of the ‘end’ of history. In particular, these societies are marked by boredom – albeit of a happy kind – because man’s drive for recognition, or amour-propre, has been tamed and reoriented in an egalitarian direction. In turn, the drive for glory and recognition that drove ‘history’ has subsided.
Thus in his constitutional recommendations for specific countries – for Poland and Geneva, to an extent, but especially for Corsica – Rousseau envisages societies that are characterised not by the classical republican ideal of virtuous political action, but rather by a peaceable, agrarian way of life that is modelled on the ritual and rhythmicity of nature itself. He lauds the ‘simplicity of rustic life’ in Corsica and proffers a constitution designed at maintaining it; he explicitly aims to ‘attach men to the earth’ by designing a system where they ‘draw their rights from it’. 18 Compared with the classical republican vita activa, what characterises these societies is their quietness, with Rousseau advising against luxury, commercial development or an advanced division of labour. In fact he tells the ‘Poles to “tend your fields … and have no other care”’. 19 These are societies modelled on the routine and order of nature itself, defined by the cyclical rhythms of private labour and agrarian life. 20
These societies appear, then, as strikingly boring. Rousseau encourages the Corsicans and Poles to maintain agrarian occupations, and to avoid the development of luxury or commerce or an excessive division of labour, as men are to realise happiness in the harmonious rhythms of work. These societies are ‘boring’, in the conventional sense, because of the suppression of luxury, novelty and so on, and with their emphasis on rhythmicity and ritual. However, they are also ‘boring’, in a more specific sense, because the public sphere of action, associated with classical republican thought, is conspicuously absent. And this public sphere of action is the stage upon which history, in the republican sense of the confrontation of fortuna or contingency, occurs. 21
Rousseau’s tranquil autarkies are boring, then, because they elide what Pocock calls the ‘world of mutability’: indeed his project, argues Shklar, is precisely ‘an effort to prevent change’. 22 He effectively dissolves the public stage of action – or in Arendtian terms, the realm of appearances – because he views political action or heroism as expressions of corrupted amour-propre or simply, recognition-seeking. This public stage of action is a realm of artifice and performativity in which men seek superior recognition and indeed, domination over others, often using the façade of eloquence or virtue. The rhythmicity and austerity of agrarian life is, then, understood as a framework within which amour-propre – or simply, the drive for recognition – can be tamed and reoriented in an appropriately egalitarian form. The need for recognition is not driven away, then, but it is both equalised and muted.
It is in this sense, in turn, that Rousseau’s agrarian republics are both boring and post-historical. They are boring because, just as in Fukuyama’s account, man is no longer driven by the equivalent of megalothymos, or corrupted amour-propre – and they are post-historical because, by the same measure, such societies step outside the flux of political history properly understood. The citizens of Rousseau’s agrarian republic are to live out a kind of freedom that is completely at odds with the historical republican conception of freedom as being realised in the life of political action, in the virtuous confrontation of contingency or fortuna - that ‘world of mutability’ upon which men impose ‘order and glory’, using, in the Machiavellian spirit, their ‘skill and courage’.23 Arguably, in turn, it is this elision of fortuna, this stepping outside of the ebb and flux of political contingency and action, that allows man to live in accordance with ‘nature’. The aim is not to restore the experience of natural freedom as such, but rather to emulate nature as a normative standard, with agrarian rhythmicity placing man in a similar relationship, with an organic (albeit artificial) whole, that he originally enjoyed vis-à-vis nature itself. 24
Rousseau’s polities are boring, then, because, by design, they are anti-heroic, because men are to step outside the kind of disorder and contingency that makes political heroism and indeed, political action possible. To live in accordance with ‘nature’ as a normative standard, means a ‘boring’ life. This explains why Rousseau, in fact, aims at dissolving the conditions of contingency and disorder that other republicans understand as being the very circumstance or prerequisite of republican freedom. 25 It stands in marked contrast with what McCormick describes as Machiavelli’s ‘republican existentialism’ – an ideal in which a citizenry ‘spiritedly reacts and hopefully adapts to the vagaries of politics – optimally reacting and adapting in ways that strengthen and invigorate [the] regime.’ 26 Indeed Rousseau warns the Corsicans, following their successful rebellion against their Genoese colonists, that: ‘Popular heroism is a moment of ardour (fougue), followed by lethargy (langueur) and relaxation (relâchement). One must found a people’s liberty on its way of being, not on its passions’. 27 Political action, then, is a recipe for instability and discord; freedom and happiness are to be found in ordered tranquillity instead. The boring peaceability of the Corsican republic is implicitly supposed to reflect, then, the very ‘eternal order of nature’ which, for Pocock, the Florentine tradition of republicanism, with its emphasis on contingency and temporal flux, had rejected. 28
Crucially, then, Rousseau, unlike Fukuyama, does not understand boredom as a source of discord or instability. To the contrary, it is the expression of a specifically post-historical mode of freedom and happiness. El Azouzi goes as far, indeed, as to suggest that Rousseau is perhaps ‘the only philosopher to find happiness in boredom’. 29 And notably, in turn, this freedom and happiness in boredom is achieved in part because of a specific orientation towards time. What is more obviously striking, in Rousseau’s social criticism, is his understanding of the unhappiness and servitude provoked by man’s runaway desire in urban modernity, and more specifically by a disequilibrium of man’s powers and desires that renders him unfree. Thus, austerity and autarky restore man to his natural wholeness; Rousseau aims, in Corsica, to ‘make [the people] love its [agrarian] occupation … to make it the general happiness of their life, and to limit their ambitions to it’. 30
Boredom, then, is a rhythmicity in which stimulation and novelty are obviously lacking, which renders man’s desires in harmony with his powers. However, what Rousseau understands as man’s division, or psychic disharmony in modernity, equally has a temporal dimension. The life of overstimulation is, after all, likely one of anticipation: one lives out of the moment, just as one lives out of oneself. As El Azouzi puts it, it is ‘the void of the being that causes the void of time – boredom’. 31 This temporal dimension of the divided man is alluded to in Corsica: the bourgeois, Rousseau suggests, is plagued not only by desire but specifically also by anticipation: he is ‘given over to softness, to the passions it excites; they plunge themselves in debauchery and sell themselves to satisfy it; interest makes them servile and idleness makes them anxious (inquiet).’ 32 ‘True pleasure’ he says, ‘is simple and quiet (paisible), it loves silence and contemplation (recueillement)’. 33 Thus, man’s harmonious relationship to the ‘natural’ rhythmicity of agrarian life is replicated in his relation to time itself.
The apparent boredom of life in Rousseau’s agrarian republics evokes Lefebvre’s account of a ‘lived temporality’, 34 experienced in the pre-modern world as a ‘mode of natural repetition’, where ‘daily life had a distinctly recurrent or repetitious character, but was profoundly lived and embodied collectively’, ‘generat[ing] newness within continuity’. 35 Life in pre-modern societies, according to Lefebvre, was ‘organized in relation to the endless, undulating cycles of birth and death, remembrance and recapitulation that mark the natural world’. 36 This kind of repetition occurs in the context of a very different relation to temporality compared with that which obtains in industrial modernity and its ‘compulsive time’, where labour is experienced repetitively according to fragmented timescales, and with ‘the dominant form of repetition [being] derived from the dictates of technology, work and production, rather than from the natural world’. 37 In another sense, Rousseau’s description of happy boredom also evokes Hannah Arendt’s description of man’s happiness in the private world of labour, of the ‘sheer bliss of being alive … in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity with which day and night and life and death follow each other’. 38
This relation to time – the state of happy boredom that Rousseau depicts in Corsica, in particular – is akin, in some ways, to what is now described as being ‘present’ to oneself – or even simply ‘mindfulness’, understood as ‘the cultivation of ways to become attentive to the present moment’. 39 Indeed, mindfulness is often co-opted as a form of neoliberal governmentality or biopower, 40 and along with related practices like yoga, 41 is used as a means of boosting productivity and human capital, 42 with the capacity to ‘create a temporality outside clock time’ 43 becoming a means for workers to better accommodate themselves with capitalist temporality. Regardless, presence-to-oneself can be understood as the temporal aspect of Rousseau’s wider concern for wholeness or unity in the self. Happy boredom is juxtaposed with the experience of anticipation in modernity. To be present to oneself is simply, in one sense, to be liberated from anticipation or future-orientation. Indeed, evoking the Rousseauian concern for presence, or presence-to-oneself, a recent philosophical book on digital distraction and the self is poignantly entitled ‘Wish I were Here’. 44 This juxtaposition of happy boredom with anticipation is alluded to where Rousseau describes modern urban man as enervé (irritated) by ‘debauchery’ 45 – evoking the very modern concern of a man who lives for future pleasure, stimulation or reward. The contentment of the austere peasant-citizen is found partly in an overcoming of this future-orientation. Rousseau thus observes ‘the equality, the simplicity of rustic life has, for those who know no other kind, an attraction that makes them not want to leave it. From this, stems a contentment in his state which makes man peaceful’. 46
Varieties of ‘redemptive boredom’
It is useful to understand this idea of presence – this peculiar orientation towards time – in light of Rousseau’s wider work, and the wider connections he identifies, in particular, between happiness and orientation-in-time. In his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, the state of happy boredom is portrayed as a solitary, individual endeavour rather than as a constitutional and social/political project. In the Rêveries, Rousseau depicts boredom as a happy state defined by a presence to oneself and relatedly, by a lack of thought, reflection, and desire – and it is understood, accordingly, as a point of connection with the happiness of man’s ‘original’ state. Obviously, Rousseau cannot, and does not commit to restoring the experience of nature and its happy boredom – or indeed, the experience of natural freedom – within society as such. However, it has been suggested, as I already mentioned, that far from breaking with ‘nature’ for a wholly separate civil or political freedom, Rousseau in fact maintains nature as a ‘normative standard’ for freedom and happiness in a post-lapsarian world. 47 Indeed while agriculture itself is of course artifice, its harmony and rhythmicity and harmony emulate the benign order of nature, for post-lapsarian man. Thus while the happy boredom of the agrarian citizen will differ significantly from the experience of happy boredom for original man, it will nonetheless be modelled on it, in the sense of achieving the same psychic harmony, the equilibrium of powers and desires, that Rousseau, in his philosophical anthropology of human development, 48 argues was lost with the socialisation of man and with the inflammation of his amour-propre. This ‘empty temporality’ – or simply presence-to-oneself – may be understood as one of what Douglass calls the ‘inalienable gifts of nature’ that ‘would have to be preserved’ in order for man ‘to enjoy a harmonious and ordered existence free from the contradictions of the social system that render life miserable’. 49
Post-lapsarian man might, then, in different guises, achieve the same ‘empty temporality’ – the same presence-to-himself – that original or natural man reputedly enjoyed. And this, in turn, can be contrasted with the unhappy boredom, in early modernity, of the bourgeois – the boredom of the divided, and overstimulated individual whose desire for stimulation, in novelty and frivolity, is never fulfilled. It can be contrasted, similarly, with the phenomena, in late modernity, of what Mark Fisher calls ‘depressive hedonia’ and the ‘sensation-stimulus matrix’ – the unrelenting pursuit of pleasure, and especially of digital stimulation, that is incapable of culminating in some kind of fulfilment. 50 On the other hand, it also brings to mind William Connolly’s evocation of reactionary figures who, in McIvor’s summary, ‘are nostalgic for a slower temporality and find themselves supporting frozen hierarchies in the pursuit of a predictable, slow world’. 51
What I will call this redemptive boredom – the happy state that Rousseau depicts both in the Rêveries and in some of his political writings – differs from the unhappy boredom of the bourgeois partly, in one sense, because of what he envisages more generally as the redemptive effects of austerity in a republican autarky. However, the contrast is also attributable, in an another sense, to a different orientation in and towards time. Men in Rousseau’s agrarian republics realise freedom, then, not only, as I have argued, because of the taming of their desires under conditions of austerity, but also because of their harmonious orientation towards time itself. The bourgeois, by contrast, suffers division and conflict not only because of insatiable desire, but because of how this desire orients him in relation to time itself. In Corsica, indeed, Rousseau describes the bourgeois as ‘slaves’, given over to ‘debauchery’ and the ‘passions it excites,’ 52 with their ‘vanity’ focussing on ‘frivolous’ objects, entailing ‘an insatiable covetousness that makes it impossible to be content’. 53 Along with the reign of appetite, then, Rousseau seeks to tame the reign of anticipation.
As El Azouzi puts it, then, Rousseau thought his contemporaries had ‘perverted’ the very meaning of boredom not only because of ‘cultural overload’ but also because of their ‘excessive fragmentation of time and its ends’. 54 In this way, he also arguably anticipates the distinctive phenomenon of boredom under industrial modernity. Happy boredom, by contrast – both in its ‘natural’ and ‘redemptive’ expressions – is realised in man’s undivided state, in his ‘sentiment of existence’55 that was lost with his initial socialisation but which can, in principle, be recovered in the post-lapsarian world, through the recreation of a present-orientation or ‘empty temporality’. This is a state, as El Azouzi puts it, where man ‘is what he is, outside of what he knows, or does not of his past, and ignores serenely what he knows or cannot, of his tomorrow’. 56
Curiously this redemptive boredom takes two very different forms, ‘lazy’ and industrious. In the Rêveries, redemptive boredom is achieved – as an individual project – through rest and solitude, mimicking the solitude and indeed, the laziness of original man. Rousseau describes this as ‘the laziness (fait niente)’ that represented ‘the first of the pleasures that [he] wished to savour in all its sweetness’ and which was ‘no more than a man’s delicious and necessary occupation in his idleness (oisiveté)’. 57 For El Azouzi, this is ‘the project of recovering human plenitude in the practice of rest (repos), in a pleasant feeling of the vacuity of time’ – again, what he calls ‘empty temporality’. 58 And this can be juxtaposed specifically with the state of unhappy boredom that is often associated both with modernity and particularly the industrial revolution, and with the emergence of a fragmented concept of time as ‘something to be filled’. 59 Indeed, the contemporary mindfulness movement has been understood in terms of the capacity to ‘step out of time’, to achieve a different relationship with temporality. 60
By contrast, the redemptive boredom that Rousseau envisages for the Poles and Corsicans is to be realised in the industrious assiduity of agrarian life. In Corsica, Rousseau specifically and repeatedly criticises ‘idleness’ (paresse, oisiveté) as a vice, 61 and recommends the ‘assiduity’ of work as an antidote to this ‘disorder and vice’. 62 While this might seem contradictory, idleness, for Rousseau, becomes a source of happiness and freedom in the Rêveries only because it is asocial, because it is idleness in solitude. Idleness in society, on the other hand, is associated with leisure, frivolity and overstimulation. Boredom in this social state of idleness seeks relief, El Azouzi argues, in divertissement (entertainment, amusement) thus resulting in ‘existential anguish’. 63 This is a ‘tragic’ boredom. Similarly, while idleness in the Rêveries is depicted as a motor of imagination, elsewhere Rousseau understands imagination as a critical factor in the activation, corruption and inflammation of amour-propre. 64
The kind of psychic equilibrium – the harmony of powers and desires that Rousseau associates with true happiness – can be achieved, then, either in idle or industrious boredom. Both states restore man’s wholeness, the ‘harmonious nature’, 65 that Rousseau believes was lost with man’s historical ‘fall’. In the Rêveries, Rousseau ‘loses himself with a delicious drunkenness in the immensity of this beautiful system in which he identifies himself. There all particular objects escape him, he only sees himself in the whole’. 66 In Corsica, similarly, the rhythm of agrarian life restores man in a relation to society that is similar to the dependency that original man experience vis-à-vis nature itself. Thus, both solitary and industrious boredom restore the harmony enjoyed by ‘original’ or primitive man, whose soul, Rousseau says, was ‘disturbed by nothing, given over to the sole sentiments of his current existence with no idea of the future as close as it might be, and his plans, like his vision, extending only to the end of that day’. 67
Unlike Fukuyama, in summary, Rousseau understands boredom as redeemable, and even as essential, rather than as being inherently disruptive and politically destabilising. Like passion and recognition – indeed, even like sociality itself – boredom is corrupted in society, but is capable of redemptive adaptation under Rousseau’s teleological view of history. Whereas El Azouzi argues that ‘we get bored in the course of our perfectibility’, boredom is itself, instead, part of the horizon of human perfectibility. Rather than being an irritant at the end of history, something to be managed and tolerated, it is rather part of a positive horizon of historical redemption.
Nonetheless, Rousseau’s commonality with Fukuyama’s account lies, firstly, in the link he draws between the state of boredom, on the one hand, and the taming or diminution of the drive for (unequal) recognition, on the other hand – with the protagonists of the Rêveries and Corsica being present to themselves or their labour, rather than being implicated on the stage of action. Moreover, and relatedly, this boredom is, like Fukuyama’s version, post-historical because it involves men stepping outside the flux of political time, of the ebb and flow of fortuna, in order to live peaceable lives modelled on the order of nature itself. Both, then, in essence view boredom as arising from this stepping outside of political time. Rousseau aims at transcending the conformation of temporal flux that other republicans, like Machiavelli, understand as prerequisites of republican freedom properly speaking. And it is man’s tranquillity in a social world that is at a remove from this ebb and flow, from the contingency of fortuna, that is constitutive of this happy boredom, and that gives it its specifically political dimension – realised, ironically, in a post-political or apolitical setting. For Fukuyama, it is also because of the dissipation of political contingency that boredom, in this distinctly political sense, arises. However, unlike Rousseau, he views this state as potentially unsettling men who may ‘seek out struggle’ and are discontented with the ‘peace and prosperity’ of post-historical liberal democracy. 68
What remains to be addressed, in the final section, is the question of how this distinctively post-historical boredom – the boredom that arises where the historical flux of politics has ceased – maps onto the distinctive juncture of post-Fordist capitalism.
Boredom, anxiety and temporality in late-capitalist modernity
I have argued that both Rousseau and Fukuyama understand boredom, whether happy or unhappy, not as an expression of modernity, but rather as a condition of post-history, specifically. Both allude specifically to a kind of boredom that is experienced in societies that, in different ways, exit the flux of political time.
A question arises, then, how this specifically post-historical boredom relates to, and intersects with ‘boredom’ in its more generic sense – a concept of boredom that is usually understood as a phenomenon of industrial modernity, and typically associated with an unwelcome absence of stimulation or novelty. It has been remarked in recent years that whereas boredom marked the era of Fordist capitalism – with workers disciplined into rigid time-routines – anxiety is, instead, the dominant affect of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, with its more precarious work patterns and technologies of distraction. 69 This shift coincides, moreover, within a general ‘social acceleration of time’, 70 or a ‘time-space compression’ 71 a process in which ‘the pace of relevant social change in core arenas of human existence is undergoing acceleration’ 72 – and where there is consequently an ‘inconsistency between the pace of socioeconomic life in the age of globalization and the temporal preconditions of democratic self-determination.’ 73 Indeed the experience of time in the post-Fordist workplace is one of ‘harriedness’ or growing temporal pressure, 74 helped along, as Hope puts it, by ‘the short-termist tendencies of financialized capitalism.’ 75 And whatever else it is, temporal acceleration seems not to be ‘boring’.
This kind of analysis frames ‘boredom’ in terms of a lack of stimulation, and in terms of an appetite for stimulation that apparently finds ample fulfilment in a digital world. Indeed, Anderson argues that both contemporary neoliberalism and right-wing populism should be understood in relation to a ‘promise of intensity’ – ‘the promise that life will feel eventful and boredom will be absent’ 76 – such that neoliberalism itself might be understood as self-conceptualising partly in opposition to boredom.
At least a part of the apparent appeal of neoliberalism lies, then, in its response to the problem of boredom in earlier phases of capitalist modernity. And boredom in this sense, understood in relation to repetition and under-stimulation under capitalist clock-time, might be seen as a peculiar phenomenon of ‘high’ industrial modernity, rather than as a condition of post-history in the manner that Rousseau and Fukuyama depict. It might be thought, therefore, that in positing boredom as a condition of liberal post-history, Fukuyama, in particular, simply failed to predict the accelerating ‘intensity’ of life under post-Fordist digital capitalism, and the displacement of boredom by anxiety as the dominant affect of the time.
Alternatively, however, it can be argued that the distinctive condition of boredom in post-history – a boredom that arises from stepping out of the flux of political time – is entirely consistent with processes of social acceleration, of temporal ‘intensity’, and with the promise of potentially infinite (digital) stimulation. It is a distinctly political understanding of boredom that is (relatively) independent of such continuing economic and social processes. It is a boredom that, as I have outlined, arises in a context where further epochal political change appears unlikely or impossible, notwithstanding what other intensities or accelerations are promised. This post-historical, and distinctively political boredom is distinct, on the one hand, from a more typical account of boredom that is often associated with material explanations, relating to psychological and social processes that arise from shifting patterns of labour and leisure. 77 It is, on the other hand, also arguably quite compatible with a society of hyper-stimulation in which anxiety has displaced the specifically Fordist experience of boredom. Indeed, the accelerated social temporality, and the ‘intensity’ of post-Fordist society, seems quite capable of accommodating the specific role Fukuyuma assigns to boredom as a kind of fizzling irritant, an almost tragicomic, relatively inane type of restlessness or unfulfillment. It accords equally with what El Azouzi describes as Rousseau’s complaint of divided man’s unhappy boredom – as ‘the excremental awareness of time, spewed from the sad clock-face, too objective and totally detached from man, from his interior time and his subjective unity’. 78
Boredom, in the distinctly post-political and post-historical sense I have outlined, arises, then, from the flux of political history ceasing, and, consequently, from the apparently unlikelihood or impossibility of epochal historical and political change. Interestingly, this contrasts with Gardiner’s argument that boredom in modernity ‘is above all an estrangement from the formerly stable moral and socio-cultural foundations of acting and thinking’ 79 – because boredom, in this sense, is caused by an exit from temporal flux of politics, not by an exit from stability. Accordingly, post-historical boredom, in the sense I have outlined, can be distinguished from this materialist and fatalistic sense of boredom that arose in the 19th century, and that was ‘couched … in a discursive form that is thoroughly materialist, secular and reconciled to the demise of transcendental meaning’. 80
Political boredom as interregnum
What meaning can this post-historical boredom now have, given the apparent error of Fukuyama’s heralding of the ‘end of history’? After all, it seems clear he wildly overestimated the stability and indeed, the inevitability of liberal-democracy and capitalism following the end of the Cold War. ‘History’, in our conventional wisdom, has returned (or continued) with a vengeance.
Arguably, Fukuyama’s picture of post-historical stasis still has some resonance despite a period of political ‘intensity’, and the drama of political events. As I argued earlier, Fukuyama understood history as having ‘ended’ not because liberal democracy would yield no tensions or problems, but only because such tensions or problems would fail to collapse it or bring about its replacement by an alternative system. While Fukuyama certainly underestimated the instabilities of capitalist liberal democracy and its vulnerability to recurrent crisis, his assertion of historical ‘finality’ is arguably borne out in certain contemporary analyses of capitalist crisis. For example, the same kind of historical stasis can arguably be identified in Wolfgang Streeck’s account of a late-capitalist interregnum – a period where capitalist democracy is beset by long and terminal crisis, but without a viable successor system coming into sight. In contrast with Fukuyama’s post-history, this interregnum is crisis-ridden and dysfunctional, but, culturally and socially, it is beset by a similar sense of inevitability and stasis – with ‘no masterplan of a better society that will displace or replace capitalism.’ 81 Like Fukuyama’s account of post-history, this is a period of stasis rather than flux – with no revolution in prospect – but unlike Fukuyama’s account, capitalist tensions or contradictions do not result in mere discontented fizzling, but a protracted period of ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘social entropy’. 82
In summary, then, the present interregnum differs from Fukuyama’s post-history in that it is characterised by the breakdown of an earlier hegemony, both ideational and institutional, but what unites it with the post-history concept is the absence of clear alternatives. And hence its affinity, I suggest, with a similar and specifically post/political concept of boredom. Unlike Marx’s account of crisis as ‘violent eruptions’ following upon contradiction, 83 instead this interregnum entails a ‘continuous process of gradual decay, protracted but apparently all the more inexorable’. 84
A salient question, I suggest, is to consider what a specifically political boredom means in this period of interregnum. This interregnum is a period of continuing social and technological intensity and of temporal acceleration, but combined with political stasis, defined, in Streeck’s terms as the apparent unavailability of clear alternatives to a crisis-beset political-economic system. This is a context defined by uncertainty and flux – with all that is ‘solid’ still ‘melting into air’ – but with no apparent prospect of such tensions and contradictions yielding epochal change.
Crucially, Streeck argues that the ‘interregnum’ we have entered is, and will continue to be defined by increasing insecurity, precarity and with an emphasis on individual resilience in a context of social entropy – a society ‘devoid of coherent institutions capable of normalising the lives of its members and protecting them from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts.’ 85 What this suggests, in turn, is that post-historical boredom may very well coincide and overlap with the continuing ascendancy of anxiety as the dominant affect of a (decaying) neoliberal capitalism. Social life in the interregnum will, he suggests, be marked by ‘coping, hoping, doping, and shopping’, improvised therapies that are resorted to compensate a failure of social integration. 86 Correlatedly, the instrumentality of politics itself seems diminished in an age of temporal intensity. As Rosa puts it, ‘politics today no longer seems to be the actor and pace-maker of social change; quite to the contrary, political agendas have become situationalist attempts at “muddling through,” at (often anachronistically) re-acting to the pressing demands arising elsewhere’. 87 Thus, the phenomenon of ‘de-synchronization’ – with political temporality unable to keep up with social acceleration in other domains – leads to the adaption both of ‘multiple or fragmentary selves’ as endorsed by postmodernism, and the ‘adaptive and flexible characters advocated by neo-liberals’ – but with both thwarting the promise of autonomy. 88 In parallel with this, indeed, an acceleration as well as an intensification of politics may be promised in response to social and economic acceleration itself. 89 This confluence of acceleration and intensification seems peculiarly apt to the Trump/Brexit era of Anglophone politics, with a promise of liveliness, spectacle and buccaneering freedom combined with a commitment to near-instantaneousness (‘get Brexit done’.)
The boredom of the interregnum, then, is defined by a peculiar confluence of stasis and intensity. Unlike the Fordist-modernist version of boredom, it coexists with intensity, but it is coloured by a repressed or implicit anticipation of a type of political change that is both unlikely and unknown. Like Marx, Streeck sees (post/late-) capitalism as ‘fundamentally unruly’, 90 but unlike Marx, believes that the contradiction associated with this unruliness do not result in revolution, but rather dysfunctional stasis and indeterminacy, a kind of pressured ‘limbo’. 91 Indeed, there may be parallels with what Žižek describes as the ‘detached subject’ that emerges in late-capitalism, corresponding to the ‘depression’ phase of the famous ‘five stages of grief’ that he maps onto capitalist crisis and collapse. 92 Not dissimilarly, Streeck describes the late/post-capitalist interregnum as being marked by ‘widespread cynicism regarding political and economic life.’ 93
Indeed it is deeply ironic that while the experience of clock-time boredom under Fordist capitalism reached its apogee at the height of a world-historical struggle with communism, neoliberalism’s redemptive ‘promise of intensity’ came into its ascendancy just as this conflict had given way to supposed post-history and a consensus of political inevitability. The post-Fordist neoliberal promise – ‘of enlivening risk and positive uncertainty’ 94 – receives a translation, or rather a simulacrum in political life, but with political ‘history’ closed. And this coincides with what Hassan describes as the ‘individualization and political passivity that capitalism injects into the bloodstream of civil society through consumerism and commodification’. 95
Thus, the ‘intensity’ of neoliberalism and its political styles, mimicking its anxious work patterns, coexists with a spectre of nothing epochal happening, or threatening to happen. It occurs just as, in Perry Anderson’s description, ‘there are no longer any significant oppositions – that is, systematic rival outlooks – within the thought-world of the West’; 96 moreover, it has been argued that we have experienced a ‘broad social transition to a network time that displaces the dominant logic of the clock’. 97 While ‘history’ has ostensibly resumed – dramatically – following the end of the C old War, the theatre of politics has arguably become more ‘intense’ just as political ‘history’ remains closed. The ‘empty time’ of Fordist temporality has come ‘unstuck’ just as ‘history’ (arguably) halts. Indeed the ‘intensity’ of politics in neoliberal post-history arguably offers a tragicomic simulacrum of the digital distraction and overstimulation contemporaneously driving the cultural realm: the need for stimulation is inexhaustibly met while nothing historical threatens to happen. Moreover, the ‘promise of intensity’, as Anderson argues, is one made not only by neoliberalism, but more specifically by right-wing populism in the Trumpian era; it is a way of demarcating oneself from the liberal ‘establishment’, but also implies compensatory or redemptive dimensions. As Anderson argues, ‘discontent is channelled into a desire for the present to feel differently, as a response to the imaginative-affective foreclosure of ‘coherent’ alternatives.’ 98 Or for Beckert, the exhausted ‘promissory legitimacy’ of neoliberalism post-2008 has yielded to an ‘anomy’ entailing ‘normative alienation’ as ‘the existing economic structures are so entrenched in established power constellations that it seems impossible to expect a process of social reform to be able to realign them with the normative beliefs held in society’. 99
Boredom, then, arises in the post-capitalist interregnum precisely because instability and insecurity do not translate to political possibility or flux; in the absence of obvious alternatives to capitalism, politics becomes petty and trivial. It is, as Streeck puts it, a state where ‘everything is possible, but nothing has consequences’. 100 Thus, a general condition of indeterminacy translates to ‘ample opportunity for disoriented, arbitrary, frivolous and cynical manoeuvring’. 101
Conclusion
I have considered, in this paper, what it means to treat the question of boredom in a thoroughly political sense. On the one hand, this involves moving away from material and psychological explanations of boredom in modernity, and in particular, considering the social experience of boredom as part of the context of the ‘promise of intensity’ in contemporary politics, as Anderson has discussed. Boredom, then, is the context of a ‘drive towards social acceleration’, should be understood as an ‘ethically and politically unregulated, largely hidden feature of collective social existence.’ 102 On the other hand, I have argued that a thoroughly political rendering of boredom requires considering its relation to concepts of history and historical finality. Paradoxically, rendering boredom ‘political’ means considering it as an expression of the post-political. While I have discussed boredom mostly in relation to the present stasis of neoliberal capitalism and the long late/post-capitalist ‘interregnum’, it is true that this is merely one version or vision of post-history or indeed, of post-politics. Indeed I described Rousseau’s autarkies as another, happier vision of post-political boredom. More pertinently, it might appear that the (re)appearance of rivals to neoliberal capitalism, particularly populist or authoritarian projects, undermines the argument that meaningful ‘politics’ has ceased under the neoliberal interregnum, such that political flux, and prospects of epochal change, have returned with a vengeance. Alternatively, however, these ostensible alternatives to liberal democracy can be understood, instead, as expressions of simulated ‘intensity’, even of theatre within what Streeck describes as the stasis of the late-capitalist interregnum, and thus as entirely consistent with ‘boredom’ as a political state. What a redemptive boredom under late capitalism might appear as is, in turn, an open question.
ORCID iD
Eoin Daly https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5252-2386