Boredom is a symptom of one’s own cultural and ideological limits

Evidence

I have found it enlightening to come at this issue from a different direction, however, by raising the question of boredom as an aesthetic response and a phenomenological problem. In both the Freudian and the Marxist traditions (for the second, Lukacs, but also Sartre’s discussion of “stupidity” in Sartre Journal of the Phony War), “boredom” is taken not so much as an objective property of things and works but rather as a response to the blockage of energies [whether those be grasped in terms of desire or of praxis). Boredom then becomes interesting as a reaction to situations of paralysis and also, no doubt, as defense mechanism or avoidance behavior. Even taken in the narrower realm of cultural reception, boredom with a particular kind of work or style or content can always be used productively as a precious symptom of our own existential, ideological, and cultural limits, an index of what has to be refused in the way of other people’s cultural practices and their threat to our own rationalizations about the nature and value of art. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School and Lukacs tradition on aesthetic reception; also echoes the reader’s interest in periodizing aesthetic response. — connects to: Exhaustion makes tabloid culture’s degraded content irresistible despite boredom — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2489; Rave culture’s energy may be one symptom of a wider cultural depletion — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1226; Boredom’s absence in stimulus-rich culture blocks the questioning that once fueled movements like punk — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2126