[Events] Bored? See topic of this Friday's Sociology Seminar, 1-2pm

[Lee.Monaghan]

Seminar Series 2010

Michael E. Gardiner 

Friday, 1-2pm (Venue to be confirmed: will be advertised on events before Friday)

"The 'Trojan Horse' of Boredom: Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin"<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />

Although very different in temperament, writing style and personality, the French thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) and German Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) developed a remarkably similar (and eminently dialectical) account of modernity, combining rigorous critique, a rejection of backwards-looking nostalgia, Left pessimism, or transcendental appeals of any kind, and the search for utopian potentialities in the hidden folds and recesses of everyday life. This talk will focus on a particular phenomenon of considerable interest to both thinkers, one that is arguably intrinsic to modernity: that of boredom, a peculiar mode of temporal experience through which we can grasp a much wider spectrum of contemporary anxieties, socio-cultural shifts, and subjective crises. Curiously, although each refer to it fairly often, neither analyzed the concept in a systematic fashion, and they used the term "boredom" in loose, elliptical and even apparently contradictory ways. Yet, such a lack of clarity reveals not only a certain shared ambivalence about this phenomenon; it can highlight a subtle pattern of differentiation between particular modalities of boredom that, if carefully attended to, can be highly illuminating. Although Benjamin's reflections on boredom have received a fair amount of attention to date, critical commentary on Lefebvre's treatment of the same topic is notable only in its complete absence. Accordingly, this presentation will focus mostly on Lefebvre's contribution, reading the latter's comments on boredom through something of a "Benjaminian lens." Such a reading reveals that Lefebvre discriminates in subtle and nuanced ways between different experiences and expressions of boredom, some of which are unambiguously negative, whereas others are judged more positively, insofar as they are, as he says in the 1962 work Introduction to Modernity, "pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, [and] unrealized possibilities." In meditating on this and similar passages, we can begin to glimpse latent connections between boredom and utopian propensities that caught the attention, not only of Benjamin, but also other critical thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer. Accordingly, this talk will explore Lefebvre's embryonic "sociology of boredom" as a significant yet underexamined component of what Situationist Raoul Vaneigem called the "revolution in everyday life."

Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor in Sociology at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. His books include the edited four-volume collection Mikhail Bakhtin: Masters of Modern Social Thought (Sage, 2003), Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with Michael M. Bell), and The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (Routledge, 1992). He has also authored numerous articles and book chapters dedicated to Bakhtin in particular and dialogical social theory in general, as well as ethics, critical theories of everyday life, and utopianism. His current research is dedicated to French thinker Henri Lefebvre, in relation to issues of embodiment, perception and theories of affect.


Seminar convenor

Dr. Lee F. Monaghan 
Senior Lecturer 
Department of Sociology 
University of Limerick 
Ireland

tel: 00353(0)61-213346

e-mail: lee.monaghan at ul.ie

http://www.ul.ie/sociology/lee.monaghan.html 

 
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