Bakhtin, Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

Abstract

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.

Keywords:

• Bakhtin
• boredom
• modernity
• irony
• skepticism

Notes

1. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 108.

2. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, 15.

3. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 11; also of interest is Dalle Pezze and Salzani, eds., Essays on Boredom; Toohey, Boredom: A Lively History; and Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History.

4. Dalle Pezze and Salzani, “The Delicate Monster,” 13.

5. Although I cannot delve here into the question of how uneven processes of modernization have affected the experience of boredom on the colonial peripheries, see Majumdar, Prose of the World.

6. Pechey, Mikhail Bakhtin, 7.

7. Pechey, “Boundaries Versus Binaries,” 23.

8. Polan, “Bakhtin, Benjamin, Sartre,” 11.

9. Leroux, “Exhausting Ennui,” 1–15.

10. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 22.

11. Pechey, “Eternity and Modernity,” 61.

12. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, 11.

13. Heller, A Theory of Modernity.

14. See Raposa, Boredom; and Toohey, “Ancient Notions of Boredom,” 151–64.

15. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 4.

16. See Lepenies, Melancholy and Society.

17. Lukács, Theory of the Novel.

18. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History.

19. Kierkegaard, “The Rotation Method,” 281–96.

20. On such “minor affects,” see Ngai, Ugly Feelings.

21. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 14.

22. See Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 174–86; and Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline,” 56–97.

23. Lefebvre and Régulier, “The Rhythmanalytical Project,” 5.

24. See Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia.

25. See, for example, Featherstone, “The Heroic Life,” 159–82; and Gouldner, “Sociology,” 417–32.

26. Weber, The Protestant Ethic.

27. Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 155–200.

28. Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” 7–11; and Kelly, “The Historical Emergence,” 77–91.

29. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 18.

30. See Barthes, “Dare to Be Lazy,” 338–45; Kracauer, “Boredom,” 331–34; and Osborne, “The Dreambird of Experience,” 36–44.

31. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 105; Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 91.

32. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason.

33. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 420.

34. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 16; see also Lugowski, Individuality and the Novel.

35. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 77.

36. Ibid., 60.

37. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 251.

38. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 7.

39. Ibid., 20.

40. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 177.

41. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 15.

42. Ibid., 368–69.

43. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 132; and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 293.

44. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 71.

45. Menand, “Woke Up This Morning,” 108.

46. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 160.

47. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 123.

48. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 123.

49. See Koselleck, Futures Past; and Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 123.

50. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3, 85.

51. See Toulmin, Cosmopolis.

52. Haladyn, Boredom and Art, 20.

53. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 57.

54. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

55. Morson and Emerson, “Introduction: Rethinking Bakhtin,” 9.

56. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 441.

57. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 26.

58. Ibid., 118.

59. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 127, 171.

60. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 285.

61. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 137.

62. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 471.

63. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 149.

64. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 280–81. For more on language understood as a “commons,” see Gardiner, “Bakhtin and the General Intellect.”

65. Erfani, “Sartre and Kierkegaard,” 303–17.

66. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 229. 

67. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, 124.

68. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 23.

69. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 51.

70. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 64.

71. Ibid., 49, 55.

72. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, 181.

73. Ibid., 229.

74. Goodstein, Boredom and Modernity, 5.

75. Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, 21, 27.

76. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 111.

77. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 154.

78. Ibid., 170.

79. Ibid., 135.