Boredom reflects objective social dullness rather than human nature

Evidence

The act of dozing in the sun marks the culmination of a crucial element of free time under present conditions - boredom. The miracles which people expect from their holidays or from other special treats in their free time, are subject to endless spiteful ridicule, since even here they never get beyond the threshold of the eversame: distant places are no longer - as they still were for Baudelaire’s ennui - different places. The victim’s ridicule is automatically connected to the very mechanisms which victimize. At an early age Schopenhauer formulated a theory of boredom. True to his metaphysical pessimism he teaches that people either suffer from the unfulfilled desires of their blind will, or become bored as soon as these desires are satisfied. The theory well describes what becomes of people’s free time under the sort of conditions of heteronomy, and which in new German tends to be termed Fremdbestimmtheit (external determination). In its cynicism Schopenhauer’s arrogant remark that mankind is the factory product of nature also captures something of what the totality of the commodity character actually makes man into. Angry cynicism still does more honour to human beings than solemn protestations about man’s irreducible essence. However, one should not hypostatize Schopenhauer’s doctrine as something of universal validity or even as an insight into the primal character of the human species. Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labour. It need not be so. Whenever behaviour in spare time is truly autonomous, determined by free people for themselves, boredom rarely figures; it need not figure in activities which cater merely for the desire for pleasure, any more than it does in those free time activities which are reasonable and meaningful in themselves. Even fooling about need not be crass, and can be enjoyed as a blessed release from the throes of self-control. If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of the eversame, they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflection of objective dullness. As such it is in a similar position to political apathy. The most compelling reason for apathy is the by no means unjustified feeling of the masses that political participation within the sphere society grants them, and this holds true for all political systems in the world today, can alter their actual existence only minimally. Failing to discern the relevance of politics to their own interests, they retreat from all political activity. The well-founded or indeed neurotic feeling of powerlessness is intimately bound up with boredom: boredom is objective desperation. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier ‘free time as administered continuation of work’ theme and to the noise/silence books’ treatment of apathy as a structural product, not a personal failing.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that boredom is ‘objective desperation’ — a social symptom rather than a psychological state — is the chapter’s most challenging, densely-argued idea, aligning boredom with political apathy as twin symptoms of powerlessness.
• QUESTION: Adorno insists boredom ‘need not be so’ under autonomy — worth testing: is there any genuinely autonomous leisure culture to falsify this against, or is the counterfactual purely hypothetical?